


An Imprint, Imperfect

by outlier



Series: thanks a lot, red k [1]
Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Accidental Marriage, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/F, Minor Alex Danvers/Maggie Sawyer, Not Canon Compliant, Red Kryptonite, actions under the influence, rituals and traditions, some sexual aggression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-06
Updated: 2018-08-18
Packaged: 2019-06-22 13:22:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 26,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15582906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/outlier/pseuds/outlier
Summary: Kara didn't quite understand what Kal-El meant when he said she would join the House of Danvers. Red K made things even messier, especially when things were said that couldn't be taken back. Now, she and Alex were stuck, together-not-together, caught up in misunderstandings and their ramifications.





	1. Reflections (on Red K)

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: Kara does get a little sexually aggressive under the influence of Red K here, but this is not a rape story. The narrative takes her elsewhere before things progress too far. There's also a bit of Alex/Maggie, but it deviates quite a bit from canon. (As all things herein deviate quite a bit from canon.)
> 
> They're both so pretty when they're upset. I blame this on that.

“You’ll be a part of their house now, Kara.”

Kara had never forgotten it, Clark leaning over her with sad, weary eyes. His hands were on her shoulders, squeezing lightly – perhaps in a way he thought was comforting. His Kryptonian was little more than rudimentary, and it was clear to her later, once she’d been on Earth long enough to have observed the way of things, that he hadn’t meant it the way she’d understood it then. He hadn’t meant it in the way that took root deep inside her, folding itself into her life as an inevitable truth that never could quite be excised, even when it became obvious it was no truth at all.

In memory, his failings compounded.

What else was a young Kara to do other than absorb the information? She’d be part of the House of Danvers, he’d said, smiling at her like it was a good thing. She’d take their name – _her_ , Kara Zor-El of the mighty and noble House of El. The name of this house of human scientists, with their young daughter who scorned her even though their match had been made. It was yet another insult. Her planet was dead, along with everyone she’d ever known, and here was Kal-El, her baby cousin, bereft of any knowledge that might have made him useful, arranging her marriage with the most convenient House he could find. Stripping away her name. Giving her to this girl, who hated her. Giving her to a _human_.

She’d been forced to rely on the humans’ beneficence, orphaned and abandoned. They were kind and helpful when they wanted to be, but just as often self-absorbed and forgetful. The young one, the one to whom she’d been promised, was fickle in her constancy. At first, she’d been cautiously cold, leaving Kara to learn the boundaries of her new world with help from the well-meaning but distracted parents. Kindness came in patches – an explanation here, the comfort of touch there – but Alex had a life. She had friends, school, hobbies. Kara spent most of her time on the roof, staring at the stars, finding more comfort in the cold vacuum of space than in flesh and blood.

What else was there to do? The math and science she was forced to endure at the school Eliza and Jeremiah insisted she attend was archaic. She felt no need to learn the history of yet another condemned planet, a planet that wasn’t hers and likely never would be. Earth seemed determined to march to its doom as steadfastly as Krypton had, no matter that her cousin proclaimed himself its protector. She wanted to ask him what gave him the right to the symbol of the House of El? What gave him the right to bear it, and to let it be slapped on everything from lunch boxes to underwear? He couldn’t speak their language, didn’t know their customs and rights. He didn’t know the significance of what he wore emblazoned on his chest, and never would. In every way that mattered, he was little more than a human who could fly.

And yet he gave her heritage away as easily as he’d given her away.

The petty jostling that seemed to dominate the lives of everyone who fit into the same category of physical development as she – and thus her _age_ – disgusted her. On Krypton, she’d been preparing to enter a Guild. She’d been concerned with little other than the rigorous training that would prepare her for a life of meaning, not lost to the impossible to interpret social games that dominated the lives of her so-called classmates. Their words drifted past her day in and day out, whispered rumors, subtle reminders to anyone who looked to move beyond their designated place, and outright threats issued by people who judged themselves to be beyond censure or retribution.

Human hierarchies were brutal, trivial things.

There had been intrigue on Krypton, no doubt, but never anything so puerile. There, the questions were of ideology and methodology, designed to advance Krypton to everyone’s interests. Minor houses might seek to position themselves in the most favorable light, to leverage their way into a major house with all of the benefits that brought, but they didn’t do so on the slithering, venom-tongued slander that determined the high school pecking order. Nothing on Krypton had ever been so meaningless.

It had been galling, then, to realize she’d allowed herself to be drawn into it. It hurt when she heard Alex laugh along when one of her friends said something unkind about Kara, even if she didn’t laugh as loudly or as fully. It hurt to see Alex blush when Kara would speak to her at school, or to see Alex slip away at the sight of her. She didn’t care about Alex’s friends, didn’t care about what they thought or how they treated her, but Alex... Alex _knew_ her. Alex lived with Kara Zor-El, not Kara Danvers, the weird transfer student who couldn’t ever say the right thing or manage to successfully fade into the background and thus out of notice.

And after Jeremiah… well.

Kara wanted to scream that she knew grief. She knew loss. She knew the pain of longing for what had been but would never be again. If there was one thing Kara and Alex could share, it could be this.

Alex wasn’t interested in comfort – not from her. Instead, Alex offered vitriol. She offered accusations. It was Kara’s fault, she screamed. If Kara hadn’t come to live with them… If Kara hadn’t done the one thing they’d told her not to do… If Kara had never come to Earth in the first place…

She felt guilt, yes. Had she not coaxed Alex into flying with her, then perhaps Jeremiah Danvers would be alive. It weighed upon her, the knowledge that she’d caused sorrow, but she hadn’t known. She hadn’t set out with the intention of inflicting a great, gaping wound on the Danvers family. It was a punishment out of proportion to the crime. A few moments of freedom, and Jeremiah Danvers was gone.

Alex was all but gone, hostile and angry and uninterested in anything Kara tried to offer.

So Kara retreated again. She watched them, these humans. Watched them and learned, and they were little better than _savages_.

They spent so much of their time fixated on satiating carnal needs. Krypton had advanced beyond the need to mate, but even a cursory study of Earth showed that little seemed to differentiate them from animals, despite what they felt to be an innate superiority. If they weren’t having sex, they were in pursuit of it. Everywhere she looked, she found its antecedents. Couples touched constantly, kissed in public hallways, hid away under the bleachers. The uncoupled schemed, sometimes innocently, sometimes not. It permeated every interaction, this perverse need to _fuck_.

It was all so… base. She was repulsed by the thought of it – the exchange of fluids, the idea of skin against skin, the messy and awkward reality of sex. Kisses were supposed to be the light touch of lips against cheeks or, perhaps, the glancing brush of lip against lip. They weren’t supposed to be the open-mouthed, tongue filled horrors she saw nearly every day, in real life or on television. It was unhygienic, the way humans seemed compelled to lick and bite and taste one another, and for what? There was as much intimacy in the twine of fingers together as there was in matching mouths to genitalia. Perhaps more, because to hold someone’s hand was to be there with them, in that moment. To lick and suck various body parts in service of some fleeting release was little more than the use of another for one’s own ends.

She would have preferred to have remained ignorant of the many indecencies humans subjected themselves to willingly, but that was little more than a useless thought experiment. Besides, this was the world in which she was forced to live, and one day, it would be expected of her. Her bondmate had little use for her, but the time would come when they’d be joined, and that’s what joining meant on Earth. She would be expected to do those things with Alex, to debase herself in service of Earth’s primitive version of intimacy.

The knowledge of it perverted everything. She found herself watching Alex with the understanding that, one day, Alex would come to her. She measured the dexterity of her fingers and watched the way her lips shaped themselves around words. She tracked the development of secondary sex characteristics – wider hips and growing breasts – and monitored the changes in Alex’s face. Over time, she learned the nuanced differences in smell – Alex clean, Alex perspiring, Alex menstruating, Alex aroused. She learned the less nuanced differences in expression – Alex angry, Alex frustrated, Alex annoyed, Alex apathetic.

She learned the rhythm of her heartbeat, the sound of her voice, and the heat of her skin.

There were ways they would be the same as the couples who predominated – men and women, boys and girls – and ways they would be different. There was no birthing matrix here, no chance for reproduction even if they adhered to Earth’s standards. From an evolutionary perspective, everything about the way she would perform acts of physical desire with her bondmate would be useless. It eliminated the nightmare that was childbearing on this backwards planet, but raised other questions. Was it possible that she might come to enjoy mating for its own sake? She had adapted to Earth’s food. She’d adapted to its yellow sun, its non-poisonous water, and its garish clothing. Already, pieces of Krypton had been chipped away. No one spoke her language. Her knowledge of math and science atrophied by virtue of outstripping the tools for its use on Earth. Sometimes she struggled to remember the principles that had guided her first 12 years of life, caught between the rules and structure of Krypton and the primitive, sensation-seeking impulses of Earth.

What was the use in clinging to a past only she knew?

Days turned to months turned to years, and she found she couldn’t stop thinking about it. What would Alex want of her? She knew Alex better than anyone else. She could draw the whorls of her ears from memory, could sketch out the line of her bones. It wasn’t something she’d planned, or even the result of a meaningful concentration of effort. Alex was her gateway to the wider world. All of the time she’d spent learning and copying mannerisms had imprinted Alex onto everything she touched.

Alex slept an average of 7.35 hours a night. She preferred curling up on her left side as opposed to her right, and tucked her arm under her pillow. Roughly two hours before she awoke, she’d kick the blankets off of her feet, and from then until her alarm rang, she’d cycle through with moment’s long bouts of consciousness – sheets on, sheets off, sheets on again – until her breath grew lighter and faster and her body temperature began to rise. Kara would watch the first rays of sunlight as they inched up over the windowsill, spilling out onto the floor and climbing the legs of Alex’s bed. They’d never quite make it to the exposed bottom of her foot or the bare skin between the top and bottoms of her pajamas, revealed each day in variations – 1 inch, 2 inches, somewhere in between, depending on how easily she’d slept.

Alex never did seem to notice just how much Kara saw.

And then, Kenny was murdered. Over the course of days, Alex went from aggrieved and indifferent to an ally. She saved Alex, not once but twice, because Alex trusted her to do it. Alex put her life in Kara’s hands, never doubting her, and Kara kept her safe.

After years of enmity and grudging tolerance, in the span of a week the girl – her wife, because except for the formality of a bonding ceremony, that’s what she was – changed. She became Alex-as-home, not Alex-as-inevitable-future. She became Kara’s protector and teacher, the heartbeat Kara could find, always.

She became confusing.

Like they had when she’d first arrived on earth, before Jeremiah’s death and Eliza’s expectations had driven a wedge between them, they would sneak out to the roof and look at the stars together. They would hold hands and curl up together on the couch, watching television. There were rough spots, but they were smoothed over. Alex might bristle and scowl, but anything Kara wanted, Alex would endeavor to give to her. She was allowed to claim shirts, to claim the last piece of pizza, to pull Alex away from her few remaining friends and claim her time. They laid together in bed, and Kara shared memories of Krypton and of her parents and Aunt Astra, with their fingers intertwined in a way that made the memories more bittersweet than painful.

Kara learned the texture of Alex’s skin. She spent hours tracing her fingertips over Alex’s hands, her wrists, her forearms, reading the resiliency of human flesh in the often sub-vocal noises Alex would make. Soft touches made her breath go shallow; it tickled, Alex said, and Kara tried to imagine what that might be like. She didn’t have much of a frame of reference. Like breaking the surface of water, Alex said, and Kara tried to remember what that had been like on Krypton when the nuance of pressure and movement was an afterthought, a given.

Harder touches caused Alex’s breath to catch, sharp and sudden and surprised. Quick inhales moved consciously to slow, deep ones, and because of it, because Alex was so damned stubborn, Kara learned pain more slowly than she should have. She came to understand that tense shoulders forced into a relaxation poised to spring back into tension meant hurt, and Alex’s stubborn determination to adapt to and outlast it. She came to understand it as a stupid contest, Alex against herself for no purpose she could see.

Kara learned willpower as she watched bruises fade from black to blue to yellow, and willpower brought with it benefits of its own. She grew conscious of the way the edge of the desk cut into her forearm as she wrote and the peculiar feeling of a breeze rifling through her hair. She remembered pain, and knew she didn’t feel it anymore, but that didn’t stop her from learning about the intricacy of touch.

In the dark, on a soft blanket spread over the rough scratch of shingles, with the chill of night setting in as the stars came out, she contemplated the soft give of Alex’s skin. She ran her fingertips over the backs of Alex’s hand and tried to identify the bones of her wrist. She wondered if Alex’s lips would be as soft as the skin covering the sensitive veins on the underside of her forearm.

She’d run her fingers across the flat of Alex’s palm and bring them to her lips to see if she could catch a hint of the taste of Alex on her own skin, and Alex would roll her eyes and call her a goofball and Kara would feel warm inside. Happy, she came to recognize. Content.

She began to think that when the time came, she would enjoy their joining after all.

And then Alex left her. She went to college, and Kara had nothing but text messages and the occasional distracted phone call. She came home for holidays, but there was distance between them in a way there hadn’t been before. Kara tried to recapture it. On the couch, watching the silly, cheerful holiday staples, full of lost hope found again and the miracles that could be wrought by a strong enough belief, she pressed her thigh against Alex’s. She leaned into her, resting her head on Alex’s shoulder and quietly pleased at the sight of their hair mingled together, dark and light. When she brought their hands together, Alex’s fingers would tighten around hers. When she bumped her head into Alex’s chin like a kitten demanding attention, Alex would laugh and press a kiss against her temple. When she held on tight when Alex hugged her good-bye, Alex would laugh and tug playfully against the inescapable hold, promising Kara that everything would be so much better when she graduated high school in the spring.

Kara approached her day of ascension, but they did not join. Alex, in a move crueler than Kara could have expected, took lovers.

She had been denied what was hers by right, stripped of the mate she finally came to learn had never been hers at all. She had, once more, been left alone.


	2. Red K

If ever there’d been a sign that something wasn’t quite right, it was undoubtedly coming home to find her sister waiting for her in thigh-highs, garters, and precious little else.

Alex closed the door behind her gently, not quite sure if she should pull her gun. On one hand, this was her sister. On the other, this was her sister in lingerie, looking at Alex like she had been meant to find her that way. “Kara, what are you doing? What’s going on?”

Aside from the obvious, the sheer black bra and panties and the, right, the garters that Alex was trying desperately to ignore, there was something… _off_ about Kara. She was wearing make-up, with thick, dark eyeliner and heavy mascara, and it made her look menacing. The expression on her face – predatory, maybe – made Alex decide it was indeed time to slip her gun from its holster, because Kara Danvers didn’t. She just didn’t.

“Who are you?” she asked, bringing her gun up to bear on what had to be an imposter.

Not-Kara, couldn’t be-Kara, simply smirked. “As if you could harm me with that, Alex Danvers-El.”

“Who. Are. You?”

“Your sister,” Kara taunted, the cant of her lips and the flare of her nostrils nothing short of a leer. “But, we have never been sisters.”

The words struck Alex like a hard punch to her sternum, and she wavered, the barrel of her gun angling down to 45 degrees. “Kara, I don’t know what’s going on here, but you need to come with me. Something isn’t right. We’ll go to the DEO, figure this out.”

“What? I finally tell the truth and it means something’s wrong with me? Maybe I’m just tired of pretending, Alex.” Kara stepped forward, her smirk turning cutting as the barrel of Alex’s gun snapped up. “Or, maybe it’s another way you try to pretend to have power over me.”

Resentment _bled_ from her like a festering wound. Despite the ridiculous lingerie, she’d never looked more frightening.

“You spent years making me feel like I had found my place in this world and then you took that away. You were my promised, and you _left_ me. When I tried to take something for myself in turn, you told me to keep my powers a secret. When I showed the world who I truly am, you used the force of the government to keep me under your yoke. You ran from what we are to each other and then you tried to justify what you had done by telling me over and over that I didn’t know what was best for myself. That I couldn’t control myself. That I couldn’t _be_ myself.”

Alex blinked back tears and let her gun fall to her side. Kara was right – there was no point in pretending the gun could harm her or, more importantly, that Alex would be able to bring herself to use it against Kara in the first place. “That’s not true,” she whispered, chest so tight it was all she could manage. “I was – I am – frightened for you. I’m afraid of what being Supergirl might mean for you, and I worry about you. What you’re doing, it’s dangerous.”

“But what you’re doing isn’t?” Kara took another step forward, bringing her to within a foot of Alex. With a quick move, she relieved Alex of her gun, ejected the clip and the bullet in the slide, and bent the clip into a wide, unusable V.

Alex tried, and failed, to hide her flinch. “I’m protecting you.”

Rage spread across Kara’s face. “No, you’re insinuating yourself into every aspect of my life but the one where you _belong_.”

A tear broke free, coursing down Alex’s cheek. “I don’t understand what you mean, Kara. I’m here for you. I’ve always been here for you.”

“How can I believe that, _wife_ , when you refuse to recognize something as important as our bond?”

Alex wondered about alternate universes or brainwashing or some type of twisted cloning, because this Kara talked about things that were impossible as if they weren’t. “Our what?” Alex shook her head, confused, uncertain, and afraid for Kara. “Kara, you’re not making a lot of sense right now. Let me take you in and run some tests.”

Kara reached out, wrapping an inescapable hand around Alex’s wrist. “Letting you ignore what we are to one another is what didn’t make sense. No more, Alex. Our Houses were joined the day I met you. We’re meant to walk together in Rao’s light.”

As if Kara had tired of the debate, she closed the distance between them. In a lightening quick move, both of Alex’s hands were behind her back, held there in an immovable grip by one of Kara’s. It left Kara pressed tight against her, and Alex acutely aware of just how little separated her from Kara’s bare skin. At least, aware for the second before Kara’s lips found hers. After, the only thought running through her head was that _Kara was kissing her_. Kara was kissing her as if Alex was kissing her back, flicking her tongue against Alex’s lower lip and letting her teeth scrape in a way that was anomalously gentle given everything else.

When Kara drew back, Alex found she couldn’t look away from her eyes. Normally, Kara’s face was expressive. It was a manifestation of everything Kara – uncertain, doubtful, exuberant. In the low light of Alex’s apartment, this Kara seemed both wholly present and yet somehow absent, with anger and desire and keen focus fighting against a murky, vast void.

Her Kara just… wasn’t there.

Alex stiffened, reared back hard, and found the attempt to free herself utterly meaningless. She was trapped between Kara’s arm at her back and Kara at her front, unable to even generate enough room to try to twist away from her hold. She might as well have been molded into the grip of a statue, for all of the give she could find.

Kara’s lips moved to Alex’s neck, sucking hot, bruising kisses onto her skin. She could feel the ache of them when Kara drew back, smiling in satisfaction at her work.

“Kara…”

“Shh,” Kara said, her expression suddenly, incongruously tender. She leaned forward, pressing against Alex’s lips in an achingly gentle kiss. When she pulled away, it was only far enough so that their foreheads were pressed together; she spoke with her eyes closed and a soft smile on her lips. “In the name of truth and honor, I declare our marriage binding. From this day forward, throughout all time and space, and unto eternity, we will be bound together today and all days hence. Let Rao’s countenance shine upon and bless us.”

The import of the words would have been clear to Alex even if she hadn’t been present at the Kryptonian ceremony joining Lois and Clark.

“Kara,” she said, again trying fruitlessly to squirm away, “stop. Listen to yourself. Listen to what you’re saying.”

For a moment, Kara met her gaze with unflinching focus. “We were promised to each other the day we met. You’ve fled from this bond, disrespected it. I’ve been weak and let you, but I’m not weak, Alex. I’m a god among you, and a god wouldn’t let her bondmate dishonor her and disgrace their bond. I’m tired of pretending I’m not who I truly am. I’m tired of you denying what we are to one another. I’m tired of you seeking in others what you should be finding in me. You will honor your commitment.”

The last words were snarled, pinning Alex in place with their implacability. It was that shocked focus that allowed her to see the momentary flash of red spreading across Kara’s face in a pattern like shattered glass, burning bright before disappearing nearly as quickly.

It was hard to engage her scientist’s mind when Kara was biting down on her earlobe and sliding her hands under Alex’s shirt, but Alex had seen enough in her career as a DEO agent to know that whatever the red glow had been, it was significant. She discarded the idea that this was a doppelganger or clone or imposter; this Kara spoke with a familiarity that came from having lived their life together. That didn’t mean she wasn’t altered, though, infected or possessed or somehow otherwise compromised, and so clearly not fully in control of her actions.

“Kara.” Alex leaned forward to rest her cheek against the top of Kara’s head, unable to embrace her in any other way but needing to offer some bit of comfort. “It’s going to be okay.”

Her reward for the words was a sharp bite at her collarbone before Kara reared up to face her again, intent clear in the way she focused hungrily on the curve of Alex’s lips.

“I want you to do something for me,” Alex said, mind racing and voice unsteady because this wasn’t her Kara. This Kara wasn’t going to break into a grin or laugh, wasn’t going to tell her this was a joke. “I want this to be perfect, don’t you?”

For a moment, Kara looked confused. Then, the certitude reasserted itself and she nodded, looking pleased that Alex seemed to have fallen into line with her plans. With a grin sharper than Alex had ever seen on her face, Kara kissed her again, and Alex didn’t fight it. She relaxed into the kiss, let it happen, because there was nothing to be gained by fighting. She’d only hurt herself. Like this, altered in some way, Kara wasn’t to be reasoned with.

“I do want to be with you,” she said, hoping that Kara couldn’t sense her ever-building panic, “but I think we deserve something special, don’t you? After all this time?”

Her feet left the ground and Alex was floating, wrapped tightly in Kara’s arms as they drifted through the apartment toward the bedroom. Her acquiescence seemed to have quelled some of Kara’s anger. Instead of continuing to pull frantically at Alex’s clothes, she softened her touch.

“What about our bonding bracelets? I want to do this right, Kara, and it doesn’t feel right without them.”

Kara looked perplexed, and it was the closest to her Kara that Alex had seen since she’d walked in the door.

“Let’s wait until we can exchange bracelets,” Alex continued, her voice soft with forced entreaty. “Then we can be together. Let’s do this the right way.”

The heat of Kara’s hand pressed flat and unyielding against her back let her know that Kara was ready to do this right now, bracelets or not. Alex lowered her chin and looked up at Kara through her lashes, making herself as submissive as possible.

Whatever Kara saw in her seemed to please her. “I will do this for you,” she said, leaning down to kiss her with the heat of a promise, “but I won’t be long. I will make you mine in all ways, Alex Danvers-El.”

\------

“Don’t ask,” Alex said, her expression half anger and half pleading, as she strode into the DEO’s ops center. “Just take my word for it, okay. Something’s wrong with Kara. She’s not herself, and I’m not just talking about an off day here.”

Hank regarded her silently, solemnly, and Alex braced herself in anticipation of demands for more or the undetectable touch of Hank rooting through her brain. Not that she’d know, of course, undetectable being the key word. Then again, as much of a poker face as Hank had, she didn’t think he’d be able to hide his reaction to what he’d see. What would it be, she wondered? Revulsion? Disgust?

“We know.” His face was tight with tension. “Supergirl threw Cat Grant off of her building.”

Alex paled, the statement, said so sanguinely, hitting her like a blow to the solar plexus. “ _No_.”

Hank closed his eyes, as if searching for reserves beyond those he usually needed when dealing with even extreme DEO emergencies. “She caught her, thankfully. So far, she hasn’t killed anyone.”

Keenly aware that he hadn’t said that no one had been hurt, Alex took a step closer to him, needing but not wanting to know.

“Has she… have there been…”

“Sir.”

The appearance of Vasquez at Hank’s side cut in, drawing the attention of both of them. A slight incline of Hank’s head provided permission to proceed.

“Max Lord has been detained outside. He claims to have information about what’s happening.”

Hank’s jaw flexed even as Alex’s nostrils flared. Max fucking Lord, always there, always scheming and planning and plotting. Always an irritant she wasn’t allowed to kill.

“Bring him in.”

“Sir?” Alex questioned, her eyes snapping up to meet Hank’s.

“We have an impaired Kryptonian ravaging National City, Agent Danvers. It wouldn’t be in our best interests to limit our options.”

Alex knew it was true, was as anxious to hear what lies and obfuscations Lord would offer up as was Hank, but at the same time, wasn’t sure she could bear his smarmy face. Some part of her knew that her emotions were off-keel, that she’d dealt with Max Lord plenty of times before and managed to withstand his presence with little more than a lingering irritation and urgent need for a shower, but as much as she was trying as hard as she could to present the façade of the unflappable Agent Danvers, inside Alex was veering from one extreme to another, never quite able to find equilibrium.

“Mr. Lord,” Hank said, his voice slightly more chilly than usual. Sauntering in as if he owned the place despite the armed agents flanking him, Max smiled, holding his hands out, palms up, as if to underscore his harmlessness.

“Thanks for seeing me,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest and projecting an aura of confidence.

Unwilling and unable to put up with his shtick, she snapped, “You said you had information about Supergirl?”

The smile faltered slightly. “Ah, yes. About that… I think I may have accidentally had something to do with her little crime spree.”

Alex saw his lips moving, knew there were more meaningless words filling up the space, but she couldn’t hear them. Instead, she saw Kara’s eyes, missing some vital spark, and heard the rush of blood driven by a heart pounding so hard that she could feel it vibrating through her.

Two steps, and she was launching herself from the slightly raised podium, her arm drawn back. She landed a few feet in front of Max, letting her momentum carry through the punch and then further, driving Max down to the floor. She followed him, some part of her pleased with the sharp crack, the cry of pain, and the spurt of bright red blood flowing from his nose. The larger part of her, the part that could think of nothing but the way whatever he’d done had shredded through the most important relationship in her life, drew her fist back again.

“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” she hissed, bringing her fist down and feeling a sick sense of satisfaction as the back of his head cracked against the floor from the force of the blow.

There were arms wrapping around her, pulling her back, but Alex struggled forward. She didn’t know the details, didn’t need to know them. It was clear – Max Lord had decided to play one of his little games, and he’d broken everything.

“Stand down, Agent,” Hank growled, so close to her ear that the words seemed to come from inside her brain. “Stand down before I have you detained.”

Somehow, despite the threat, Alex felt herself calm. “I’m going to kill him,” she said softly, ceasing her struggles, mind and body meeting and stilling as the rightness of it rolled over her.

The grip on her tightened as Hank spun, lifting her and carrying her from the room in a reverse bear hug.

“Cool off,” he said, depositing her in an interrogation room. “I’m locking you in here until you can control yourself, Agent.” Alex thought she saw a flicker of something, compassion maybe, on his otherwise stern face. “The man may be reprehensible, but right now, he’s what we’ve got. If he is responsible for this, then maybe he knows how to fix it.”

\------

Fixing it left Alex with a broken arm, J’onn exposed as an alien, Max Lord in a detention cell in the bowels of the DEO, and Kara in tears. It left Kara gone, actually, because as soon as she was released from medical supervision, that’s what she was. She wasn’t in her apartment. She wasn’t at work. She wasn’t a familiar and visible symbol flying above National City. Alex looked. She pulled up radar, did a little unauthorized poking about with some satellites, and climbed up on the roof and screamed Kara’s name until she was hoarse.

No Kara. No Kara for two days, then three. No Kara for a week.

Then, with no other explanation, Kara returned to work at CatCo. Alex knew only because Winn texted her, a string of emojis and half-formed words that she worked out to mean that Kara was sitting at her desk once again, her sunniness slightly strained around the edges but otherwise none the worse for wear.

Alex left immediately. The only concession she made was to strip off her tactical belt and to leave her pistol behind, which was probably why the impeccably styled 20-something at the front desk asked if she had a warrant.

She had no time for it. Alex showed her FBI credentials and backed them up with her most unforgiving scowl. “I’m here to see Kara Danvers.”

The assistant looked at her badge, her face, and her badge again. “Of course, Mrs. Danvers. I’ll let her know,” he said smoothly, already picking up the phone.

Alex, who didn’t have time to correct whatever misapprehension he’d drawn, stalked past him. “She knows I’m here.”

When the elevator deposited her on Kara’s floor, it did so to a clearly flustered Winn. “Alex!” he said, far too animatedly, and went in for a hug before Alex’s laser-like glare stopped him. “I bet you want to see Kara.”

She narrowed her eyes at him, taking in the way he was fidgeting with his cardigan and nearly vibrating where he stood.

“Don’t be mad,” he said, wilting immediately. “I’m just the messenger. Kara said she couldn’t talk to you right now and was gone before I could stop her. Not that I could stop her, but you know what I mean.”

Alex put her hands on her hips and scowled. “Tell me everything you know.”

He looked left and right, darted a covert glance at Cat Grant’s office, and nodded, cowed. “Okay, but not here. Let’s go to the office.”

Everything he knew turned out to be not very much. Kara had reappeared, no explanations given. She’d sat at her desk until Cat Grant called her into her office. There had been a lot of raised eyebrows and sharp gestures (Cat) and desultory shrugs and bowed heads (Kara). Winn had been expecting drama, but it’d been surprisingly low key. Kara sulked a bit and Cat glared at her from behind the glass wall of her office, but no harsh words had actually been traded. Word spread through the office grapevine, prompting a series of heartfelt _welcome back’s_ , to which she’d smiled weakly. James had been one of them. In what was perhaps the most shocking turn of events, eclipsing even Kara’s unexplained absence and return, she’d broken up with him. Right there in the breakroom, which wasn’t nearly as private as she might have thought, Winn had whispered intently. Only barely proficient lip-reading had been needed to tell that she’d told James that they couldn’t be together and that she was sorry and little else. Kara had chewed her bottom lip through all of his _why_ and _what happened_ questions, looking sorrowfully at the floor, and James had exited the breakroom in a sad, flustered huff.

“Just like that,” Winn said, eyes wide and hands up in the air.

Gossip ripped through the office in the aftermath. Kara had been in rehab, some said. Kara, James, and Cat had been in a poly relationship, said others, and Kara had clearly gotten overwhelmed and now things were going to get even juicier. Alex wasn’t sure where the more banal explanations had gone, but according to Winn, no one seemed to be whispering about the appropriate use of emergency sick leave or an error when asking for annual leave that left Kara and her supervisor having to clear up an administrative issue regarding time and attendance.

Through it all, Kara sat at her desk with a hangdog look, pretending like she couldn’t hear the rumors swirling around her, until she’d gotten a panicked look on her face, told Winn to catch Alex when she showed up, and that was all he knew.

“How did she look?”

Winn’s apologetic expression told her more than enough.

“If you see her again, tell her to call me.” Alex stared at him until she got a panicked nod. “Tell her it’s okay. We just need to talk. Tell her no one’s mad.”

“Yeah, definitely. Sure.”

She ignored the spark of curiosity in Winn’s eyes.

\------

Kara didn’t call and Alex ran out of options.

“Supergirl,” she screamed, “I’m going to count to ten, and if you’re not on this roof by the time I finish, I’m going to jump. I’m not kidding. I’ve had enough of this.”

She’d made it all the way to 8 when Kara landed with a heavy thump. Her arms were crossed over her chest, her jaw set pugnaciously, and she wouldn’t look at Alex.

“Kara.” Alex stepped away from the roof’s edge, body language as soft and inviting as she could make it. In response, Kara’s arms drew in closer, an aggressively protective shield.

“I’m here,” she bit out, cutting an impressive figure in the faint light. A breeze rippled her cape and her hair tangled with it. Otherwise, she could have been carved from stone.

Alex sighed and ran a hand through her hair. “About time.” She stepped closer, stopping only when she saw Kara’s fingertips start to dig into the fabric of her suit. “Were you planning on avoiding me forever?”

When Kara stayed silent, she chanced another step forward. Her hand came up, fingers inches away from resting on Kara’s forearm when Kara moved out of her reach. “Don’t do that, Alex. Don’t act like nothing’s changed,” Kara said, jaw set and eyes focused on the horizon. “Don’t act like I didn’t do what I did.”

“ _You_ didn’t do anything.”

Kara’s head snapped around angrily. “That’s not true. Don’t make excuses for me, Alex. I would have…” She broke off, the words catching painfully in her throat. “Alex, I would have forced you…”

“And if you had, we would have dealt with it.” Alex pushed even the thought of it aside, as she had since the night Kara had come to her, infected with Red K. That wasn’t her Kara, and she wasn’t going to blame her for things she’d done when she wasn’t herself. She couldn’t. “Nothing tears us apart. Do you understand? Certainly not this.”

“Maybe it should.” Kara looked away, into the night sky as if she wanted nothing more than to make her escape to it. “Maybe you can pretend, but I can’t.” Her fingertips bit hard into her suit. “I know what I did. I know what I said. I’m not going to hold you to it. They were my words and my promises, not yours.” Standing there, trying to take every sordid action firmly on shoulders that didn’t deserve to hold them, she looked so painfully young and so painfully _Kara_ that Alex felt her heart clench. “The Red K didn’t make me some other person, Alex. It exposed parts of me that I don’t like. I never would have said those things or acted on them without it, but they’re still parts of me.”

Alex wasn’t stupid. She was good at deluding herself, at lying to herself, but she wasn’t stupid. She didn’t need the full picture to make logical deductions, but even so, she’d been trying really hard not to. This picture had been laid out in detail, and Kara herself had been the one to do it. It took real effort to misinterpret words like wife, vows from a Kryptonian bonding ceremony, and the hot press of Kara’s lips against her own. She’d been trying – had, in fact, been devoting substantial brain capacity to actively ignoring the implications of that night – but it had been an exercise in futility.

“What are you not going to hold me to?” she asked, voice steady and calm and all the things she was not.

Kara frowned, baleful and full of frustrated anger. She looked like she wanted to fly off, to leave this conversation and everything it entailed behind, but was forcing herself to stand still under the weight of it. “You know what.”

“This isn’t the time for misunderstandings.”

“It’s not your custom, and it’s not like you said the words back.” Kara swallowed hard, eyes hard and glinting with unshed tears. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Kara…”

“You’re not bonded to me, okay?” Kara snapped, the fabric of her uniform ripping under her grip. “Is that what you want to hear? It doesn’t matter what I said. It doesn’t apply to you. You’re free. Do whatever you want.”

Alex took in a deep breath, wanting desperately to reach out and offer comfort even as her own heart pounded. She asked, already knowing and dreading the answer. “And what about you? Does it apply to you?”

The crack of concrete echoed as Kara took flight.


	3. A lens adjusted

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alex asks some hard questions, of Clark and of herself. The answers are heartfelt, if perhaps misguided.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm roughly at the halfway point with this one, I think.

Alex needed more information, and Kara clearly wasn’t the one to give it. Clark fidgeted, always uncomfortable at the DEO, but Alex needed privacy. She needed the interference of lead lined walls, and Clark was simply going to have to deal with it.

“I need you to tell me what you said to Kara when you brought her to live with us,” she said, watching him closely and cataloguing every tic.

Clark stared back at her guilelessly, a confused half-smile making him look as affable and helpful as ever. “You were there. You saw what happened.”

She had. She’d seen Kara, impossibly young, impossibly small for someone so strong. She’d seen the way her eyes never stopped moving, taking in everything about her new situation nervously. She’d seen Clark, her only remaining family, leave her behind.

“I did, but what did you tell her, Clark? When you left her with us, what did you say?”

He frowned. “I told her she was going to live with you and your parents. I told her it was safer that way.”

“Anything else?”

“I told her she was going to be part of your house, and that you and your parents were going to take care of her.” He shrugged, and Alex searched his face for any hint of regret.

She took in the words, let them sit with her for a moment. “What do you know about the Great Houses of Krypton?”

For a moment, Clark looked taken aback. “Not as much as I should. There are data crystals at the Fortress, but there’s a lot I haven’t gotten around to learning.”

Alex rubbed at the lines formed by her furrowed brow. “How about when Houses joined. What do you know about that?”

He shrugged, palms flat on the table. “It’s all theory to me.” She could see in his eyes how much he wanted to be able to answer her questions. “I’ve spent more time on the history of the House of El than I have on the politics of it all, which is what joining Houses seems like it was. It was about gaining access to resources and status and making favorable alliances. I think my parents loved one another, but I can’t really know. Honestly, and I know this is going to sound ironic, but it’s all so alien to me.”

“What if Kara was going to join a House here, on Earth?” Alex took in a long, slow breath, trying to keep her heartrate steady.

Clark grinned, suddenly full of barely muted excitement. “Is that what this is about? Is Kara seeing someone? Is it serious?”

“Just trying to be prepared.” Alex smiled tightly. “You know how it is. I want her to feel at home here but I want to honor the culture she’s lost, too.”

Clark nodded, as if he understood, and Alex tried not to let her anger flare because it wasn’t his fault that he’d arrived on Earth as an infant. It wasn’t his fault that he’d never been able to enmesh himself in the culture of Krypton, or that he didn’t feel the link to it that Kara did. He’d been stripped away from a civilization before he’d ever been a part of it, and that was as tragic, in its own way, as Kara’s loss. She was hard on him because she’d seen what it’d been like for Kara to be abandoned by the one remaining tie she had to everything she’d lost – would probably never fully forgive him for it even if Kara did – but it was in the past and she had bigger concerns.

“She could have a bonding ceremony, like Lois and I had.” His voice lowered conspiratorially. “Should I be getting ready for one of those? I could officiate, though technically, I guess she doesn’t really need someone to officiate. Lois and I just said the words. I don’t have the connection to Rao that Kara does, but I think it’s mostly about making the promise to walk together in Rao’s light. It’s a pretty intimidating promise to make, really.” His grin turned bashful. “It’s not like wedding vows here on Earth. They’re _supposed_ to be forever, but on Krypton, they really meant it. I don’t think they had divorce. I think there’s something in the archive about being able to declare your mate unworthy, but they had to do something awful before you could do that. Commit treason or murder somebody or be dishonorably dismissed from their Guild, which, for those guys, was probably the worst of all.”

She ignored most of his commentary and honed in on the part that mattered to her the most. “So if Kara said the vows,” Alex said carefully, wanting to make absolutely sure she understood, “she would be bonded? Forever?”

He shrugged. “I think it’s the way it works.”

Alex wasn’t at all sure what to do with that.

\------

If Alex hadn’t met Maggie Sawyer, maybe things would have come to a head in a different way. Maybe she wouldn’t have felt that little shock of excitement at the way Maggie smiled at her and actually registered it for what it was. She’d been discounting that kind of thing for decades, so why do any differently just because the initiator of that spark had adorable dimples?

Because Kara had kissed her, that’s why. Kara had kissed her and at the time she’d been so wrapped up in fear and concern that she hadn’t paid attention to the fact in the way it deserved. That’s what the ruthless honesty of the dead of night was for. Turning that night over and over in her mind, reliving it even when she wanted to do anything but that, deconstructing it and examining every aspect with as much detachment as she could muster – that’s when she couldn’t ignore it. Kara had kissed her and beneath the terror and confusion, she’d _liked_ it. She cycled through shame and denial, stripped away the heartbreak caused by Kara’s hard, taunting words, and accepted the fact that a female person had pressed their very female body against hers and kissed her with soft, feminine lips, and she would like to have that happen to her again. With her consent this time.

Kara was a ghost in her actual, day-to-day life, shying away whenever they found themselves in the same orbit, but at night, she was alive in Alex’s memories. So many things looked different in light of her newly discovered perspective. It had all seemed so innocent when she was 16 and 17, finished with the stage of her life where she pushed Kara away and, instead, drew her in. How many nights had they slept together in her twin bed, Kara wrapped around her from behind and making Alex giggle with the tickling touch of her fingers against the skin just above the waistband of her pajama pants?

“Stop,” she’d say, rolling over and tussling with Kara, who always let her win. She’d wind up straddling Kara’s hips and pressing her wrists down into the mattress, panting and flushed and triumphant.

In retrospect… _fuck_. She recognized it for what it was now, the warmth that had curled in her belly as she’d wiggled against Kara, looming over her and grinning arrogantly because whether or not Kara had let her win, she’d still come out on top. They’d always kept their battles hushed, not wanting an exasperated _Girls!_ from their mom to break in on their fun. Maybe, in retrospect, aware that it wasn’t quite _normal_.

It was stupefying, how oblivious she’d been.

The memories seemed to come without end. Watching the X-Files together on Friday nights, making stupid jokes about how the _TRUTH_ was in their living room. For an impervious being, Kara was an absolute scaredy-cat. Alex would lay down on the couch, an arm behind her head where she was pressed up against the side, and Kara would stretch out on top of her. She wouldn’t even bother with propping herself up once it became clear it was a monster of the week episode. She’d slide down and Kara would press her face into Alex’s neck, peeking up often enough to keep track of the action. The rest of the time, she’d settle in, their legs twined together, and Alex would melt into the solid, heavy warmth of her and the heat of Kara’s breath against her neck. She’d play absently with Kara’s hair and narrate the parts Kara couldn’t bring herself to watch and when it was over, she’d miss Kara’s weight on top of her. She’d miss the solid muscle of Kara’s thigh settled between her legs, and the way all of that dense Kryptonian on top of her made her feel like warm honey inside.

The times they’d taken a blanket to spread out on the roof – in hindsight, so many. Alex would lay on her back, one hand behind her head and the other resting against her stomach, and Kara would curl up on her side beside her and share secrets. “We didn’t do this on Krypton,” she’d say, tracing an up and down path over each of Alex’s fingers, occasionally drifting past the ends of her fingertips and skimming across Alex’s belly. “We didn’t touch like this… for no reason, just because we wanted to. It was… we just didn’t do things like this.” And Alex would smile up at her, lulled into sleepiness by the hypnotic rhythm of Kara’s touches. She’d tease Kara about how she used to talk about Krypton –  _Calculus at 4! Oh my god, so annoying_ – and Kara would blush and mumble and bump into Alex with a little of her Kryptonian strength, sending her sliding over a few inches. The apologies would follow, Kara running her hand over Alex’s arm and down her ribs, claiming she was checking to make sure Alex’s _puny human bones_ hadn’t broken. There’d be goosebumps left in her wake and shivers that Alex explained away with excuses of being ticklish, and in the end, she hadn’t really minded it. Not at all.

How many times had they held each other tightly under the guise of helping Kara learn the intricacies of her strength? How many times had she explained away the steady increase in her heartbeat whenever Kara was near as sisterly love? In National City, they’d been mistaken for a couple more than once, and still, it hadn’t registered. She hadn’t been _willing_ to examine it, because examining it would mean examining what it might mean.

She was really, _really_ gay.

Seventeen year old Alex could maybe be forgiven. Life had hit her with a series of major events, all right in a row. First Kara, and all it meant to no longer be the sole child receiving her parents’ attention. Then, her dad, and learning how to live with the big, gaping hole his loss had left behind. She’d already had a bolus of identity exploration taking up space in her consciousness. Maybe she just hadn’t had enough bandwidth to figure it out.

Twenty year old Alex was a little dicier. She was too busy entering the stage of her life filled with too much alcohol and too little good decision-making. Relationships weren’t really working out for her, but they weren’t really working out for a lot of her friends either, and the ones who were making it work out… well, let’s just say she wasn’t willing to make that many compromises. Kara was at Stanhope, so she only saw her on breaks and at holidays. Anyway, it was absolutely normal to let someone wrap themselves around you even though you were the only two people on the couch, because Kara had never not cried when Rudolph got to the island of Misfit Toys. During the one summer she’d returned home instead of taking classes, Alex had mostly adjusted to seeing Kara in a bikini. She’d gotten used to obsessing over the striations of muscle in her shoulders, the flex of her abdomen, the thick solidity of her thighs, and the dips and valleys of her back. She’d flirted with pre-med, after all, and Kara was practically a walking anatomy class. If Kara sometimes shared the outdoor shower with her so they could both rinse off the sand they’d accumulated, it was only efficient. It wasn’t like they were naked. Just… close. She was allowed to enjoy closeness.

Twenty-eight year old Alex had less of an excuse. Living in the same city with a Kara who was out of the superhero closet and who knew her own DEO secret meant she spent an inordinate amount of time in Kara’s apartment or vice versa. Not uncommon, perhaps, but then again, when viewed from an objective standpoint, their interactions were perhaps overly tactile. In isolation, there was nothing particularly alarming about the way Kara would often come up behind her as Alex washed dishes, wrapping her arms around Alex’s waist and propping her chin on Alex’s shoulder. It wasn’t completely abnormal, the way Alex would drape herself over Kara’s back as Kara finished off the last of their take-out dinner and refused to relinquish her hold on the tv remote, holding it out of Alex’s reach and thwarting Alex’s every attempt to squirm around her defenses. It was just affection, that’s all. And if she slept over at Kara’s apartment or Kara slept over at hers? They’d been doing it for over a decade, so nothing new there.

Which… _nothing new there_. Alex had spent 10 years, off and on, either snuggling into Kara’s back as she drifted off to sleep or waking up with Kara sprawled across her own. She’d spent those same years holding hugs a little too long, and forgetting to divide her attention when Kara was in the room. She’d never heard Kara speak about possibly dating someone without internally finding a list of that person’s flaws, accompanied by a supportive if perhaps not entirely authentic disappointment when things didn’t work out. Not that Kara had even tried to date much and Alex… well, she had a few hook-ups and abortive attempts at relationships scattered throughout her history, but she was more likely to forget about expanding her repertoire of personal relationships when she had something else to think about than she was to remain receptive to indications of interest. Something like protecting Kara. Something like making it her actual, literal job to watch over her.

No one she’d ever dated had felt like home, the way Kara did. It was a long-coming realization, that maybe that was because no one she’d ever dated had been shaped like Kara. She’d been too busy trying to be attracted to men to notice. She’d found some of them nice enough and some of them attractive enough to perpetuate the idea that they were suitable romantic partners, when really she’d confused an apparently long-simmering attraction to women for a close, sisterly relationship with Kara. And of course part of her had been attracted to Kara. A close emotional bond with an attractive woman? At least some level of attraction was bound to follow.

With that epiphany behind her, Alex had plenty of time to wonder how she’d been so incredibly blind. The world was full of attractive women, now that she knew to look. The girl she sometimes rode up with on the elevator at her apartment building, the businesswoman who seemed to be on the same coffee-getting schedule, the barista who seemed like she might appreciate both Alex and the businesswoman…

Everywhere. They were everywhere.

She acknowledged it was kind of weird that Kara had been the catalyst for her epiphany. Kara was… complicated. She was part sister, part friend, part profession, and sometimes Alex wondered what things between them would have been like if they hadn’t existed in the insular world of secrets and lies necessitated by Kara’s otherness. She couldn’t really imagine Kara as human-normal, or as anything other than the girl Clark Kent had left on their doorstep. And now that she understood things about herself she hadn’t before, she couldn’t divorce Kara as Kara from the girl who’d pressed her face to the back of Alex’s neck while they slept, crammed tightly together on a narrow twin bed. Kara was two fuzzy pictures that wouldn’t quite merge, and Alex resigned herself to the fact that it would take time for her to return to seeing one without the other.

Time Kara was apparently more than happy to grant her, given her continued lack of presence. Alex figured it had to be embarrassing to have a misplaced childhood crush revealed without her consent but by her own hand. She couldn’t bring herself to believe it was anything more than that, because she _knew_ Kara. She knew her, and there was no way Kara could have hidden something like that from her for so long. Kara was awful at keeping secrets, especially from her. Red K had lifted the restraints holding back any and every thought and impulse, digging into the deepest, darkest corners of her mind and hauling out the meaningless, tattered scraps that’d been tucked away. Kara no more meant the things she’d said to Alex than she’d meant to throw Cat Grant off a roof. They were remnants pushed to the forefront and made manifest. If everything _Alex_ had ever thought was suddenly made fair game, she could only imagine the things she might say or do.

So it didn’t mean anything. Not really. Kara would figure that out in time, and she’d let go of promises made under the influence of something that took away her ability to make choices. She had to, because if she didn’t, what was the alternative? Spending her time alternating between being Supergirl and hiding being Supergirl, with friends and family but no one that was all hers to really, truly love? Chaste and loyal because of a mistake she couldn’t even be accountable for making? When it wasn’t so fresh, they’d talk about it. Maybe they’d share a pizza and laugh about the time she’d come home to find Kara wearing lingerie in her living room, with her make-up on point but a little scary. And Kara would blush and stammer and confess that there’d been a time when she’d labored under the delusion that she and Alex would get married, of all things, all because of Clark’s horrible English to Kryptonian translation. And then it would be Alex’s turn to blush and stammer and admit, under extreme duress, that maybe Kara on Red K had helped her figure out that she was gay, but that Kara wasn’t allowed to make fun of her about it. She’d just been 12 years slow on the uptake, and honestly, there was absolutely nothing wrong about spending all that time oblivious and maybe a little bit in denial. And aside from the obvious confusion and terror of the moment – when Alex knew something was wrong but not what – Kara had been a surprisingly good kisser. She could admit it. Credit where credit was due.

After, Alex would quietly pack away all of her highly embarrassing memories of being at least mild to moderately aroused roughly 27% of the time she’d spent around Kara for a span of time stretching across at least some portion of her teens and twenties. Kara would patch things up with James, or maybe move on to someone else who hadn’t had a girlfriend for half of the time he’d been flirting with her. They’d tell the story at their respective weddings one day. Or actually, probably not. They’d probably sweep it right back under the rug, where it belonged.

In the meantime, Alex was going to see if maybe she could get Maggie Sawyer to talk to her again. Alex had the feeling she could be someone special. Maggie Sawyer didn’t let her get away with anything. Maggie Sawyer was smart and savvy and somehow able to make Alex see things from a different perspective without making her feel bad about herself in the process. Maggie Sawyer also looked very, very good with her badge hooked low on her hips, even when she was in the midst of tearing Alex a new one or disapproving of Alex’s professional secret-keeping shenanigans and possibly questionable life choices. She did all of those things with that glint in her eyes, like maybe it was serious but not. Like maybe she was open to Alex challenging her back. Like maybe she was kind of hoping Alex would.

So Alex did.

She flirted.

Kara wasn’t talking to her. She wrapped her arms around herself and curled in protectively whenever Alex tried to get near her, like Alex’s touch would burn. She looked at Alex with the expression she got when she was sad, with her brow canted ever so slightly as if asking the universe why it was intent on causing her so much pain. Alex hated seeing it always, but especially directed at her. She wanted to push the issue, but how could she? The very sight of her seemed to cause Kara distress. Unless they were at scenes. Then, Kara would stalk about with clenched fists and her jaw set, glaring at everyone who wasn’t with the DEO and/or Alex, as if she resented sharing information and resources with the NCPD Science Division almost as much as Alex did. _Had_.

She thought Kara might like Maggie, actually, if she managed to get over her organizational and turf-fueled aggravation. Maggie was pro-alien in the way Alex was pro-one-specific-alien, and as much as Alex didn’t want Kara mingling with the alien community too much, she had a feeling that Kara might enjoy a carefully curated tour of the underground alien scene in National City. With someone like Maggie, she might even be able to enjoy it as Kara Danvers, intrepid reporter who was 100% human so no need to throw around words like cover identity _thank-you-very-much_.

Briefly, she considered having Winn broker the idea, but when she’d mentioned it, he’d given her a weird look and a half shoulder shrug. “We don’t… It’s not like before,” he’d said, defeated and a little bitter. “Not since whatever happened, happened.”

She’d thought about pressing Kara herself, but what Kara clearly needed was time. And, Alex told herself sternly, that was fine. It wouldn’t be the first time they’d retreated to separate corners to lick their wounds and it probably wouldn’t be the last. Their relationship was littered with time outs and breaks, with stretches of time where communication was sparse and strained. _Nothing tears us apart_ she’d said on that rooftop, and she believed it without reservation. They’d find their way back to one another. They always did.

Until then, Alex was going to work on getting a date.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks for your kudos and comments! For those who've left comments, I appreciate them all. :)


	4. Uptake Taken

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Alex realizes something and makes plans.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> RIP Sanvers official storyline. You never lived here, but I'm sure you live on in hearts and youtube vids elsewhere.

They were having drinks for the fourth time in 2 weeks, which Alex considered a supremely promising sign.

Maggie took a drink of her beer and grinned at Alex over the lip of it. “I don’t think Supergirl likes me very much.”

Alex held back the impulse to tell Maggie that she couldn’t offer any insight, because she hadn’t really had a conversation with Supergirl (or Kara Danvers) in weeks. She’d reached out, but Kara had been nonresponsive; each unanswered text had felt like some kind of condemnation. Alex wasn’t sure why, and didn’t know why she was the one feeling like an aggrieved party. She’d handled things pretty well, at least as far as she could tell. If Kara didn’t want to talk to her, then Kara didn’t want to talk to her. There were only so many times Alex could reassure her that she didn’t blame her for anything or that everything was fine. She ached for Kara, for the way she must have felt when she’d come off of the Red K, but it was Kara’s move. From what Winn told her, Kara _and_ Supergirl had been spending a lot of time with Cat Grant, so maybe she didn’t need any other confidants. Maybe Cat Grant was enough, even if she was the woman who plastered Kara’s secrets across the internet any time she managed to unearth one.

“Alex? You okay?”

Alex looked up, the dull ache in her hand letting her know that she’d had it wrapped so tightly around the bottle that her knuckles were white and bloodless. “Yeah,” she said, shaking her head. “Yeah, sorry. Work stuff.”

Maggie rolled her eyes. “Come on, Danvers. Let loose a little. Work’ll still be there in the morning.”

Her eyes followed greedily as Maggie made her way over to the pool table, Kara pushed firmly from mind. She didn’t care that Darla snorted at her as she walked past, three empties in one hand and a wet rag in the other. She didn’t care that Maggie caught her, returning the look on Alex’s face with one of her own as she picked up two pool cues.

“Care for a game?”

Alex smirked and slid off her stool, resolutely closing the door on anything beyond the moment. “You don’t know what you’re getting into.”

And Maggie, all dark eyes, dimples, and a lazy smile, said, “I’m pretty sure I do.”

\------

Alex didn’t know why she’d thought that things might go any other way. A couple of beers and a couple of games of pool, with eyes growing increasingly hooded as moves were exaggerated just that little bit necessary to draw attention to the fit of tight jeans and the dip of loose necklines, and they’d gotten the check. She hadn’t even questioned it, following Maggie to her apartment building and up the stairs, acutely aware of each flash of skin revealed when Maggie swept her hair over her shoulder or turned the corner ahead of her, hand trailing against the wall above her head so that her shirt lifted just that little bit. She was nervous and excited in equal measure, lips still tingling from the kiss Maggie had given her as soon as the bar’s door had closed behind them. It’d been a teaser, a promise of what was to come, as unnecessary as it was welcome.

“Be patient,” Maggie scolded, trying to fit her key in the door even as Alex wrapped her arms around her waist. She pressed a kiss to the curve of Maggie’s jawbone, enchanted by the softness of her skin. It all felt so right. Curves against her, curves under her hands, with long, silky hair that tickled against her neck as Maggie leaned back into her touch.

They tumbled through the door, and Alex felt giddy with anticipation. She startled when Maggie turned and leaned into her, taking a stumbling step back as Maggie’s hands found her shoulders. She hit the door with a thump that bled into a moan, because Maggie stepped into her, fingers slipping into Alex’s hair and pulling her down for a kiss.

Alex was pretty sure she’d never been kissed the way Maggie Sawyer kissed. There was no drag of stubble, or the awkward, too aggressive press of a clumsy tongue. Maggie’s kiss unfolded in layers, hot, wet, and all encompassing, until Alex was struggling to remain upright. She’d had plenty of time to consider how things might unfold, but she should have known Maggie would turn all of her expectations on their head.

“Come on,” Maggie said, taking a step back and snagging the hem of Alex’s shirt. She gave it a tug and Alex followed, and somewhere along the way her shirt ended up on the floor. She ended up sinking into the couch and swallowing hard as Maggie straddled her lap, hair falling over her ear as she grinned down at Alex. It was perfect. Everything Alex had ever wanted, and she slid her hand behind Maggie’s neck and tugged her down.

Unbidden, a memory peeked up from somewhere in the recesses of her mind, a soft but inescapable whisper that wanted to compare. Not like Kara, came the decision as Maggie settled down, slipping her hands over Alex’s shoulders and leaning down to resume their kiss. Lighter – Kara was nothing but superhuman muscle, heavier than her build would lead one to believe. If she’d been in Maggie’s place, Alex would have felt it in her thighs, all that strength keeping her in place by accident. She didn’t even know if Kara knew, if she understood what it felt like to be underneath someone so solid and immovable. Not threatening, because she knew Kara would spring away at even a hint of discomfort, but soothing, like an anchor tying her in place.

“Is this okay?” Maggie asked, her fingers brushing against the clasp of Alex’s bra.

Alex didn’t answer. She drove her fingers in Maggie’s hair and held her close, their kiss growing frantic. Kara wasn’t there. Maggie was there, and she felt so good, knew all the right ways to touch, and Alex wanted her. She wanted her, wanted to have this, to see where things would go and enjoy every step along the way.

Kara had no place in that moment. Alex tried to push her out of her mind, to forget the way she’d looked the last time Alex had really talked with her, angry and sullen and so very sad. She’d absolved Alex of a responsibility Alex hadn’t accepted in the first place, and _damn_ it. _Alex_ hadn’t said anything. _She_ hadn’t made any promises. _She_ hadn’t completed any bonds.

But _Kara_ had said the words. _Kara_ was bound by them. Kara was from Krypton, where those kinds of things were for life, and she didn’t like Maggie and she hadn’t talked to Alex about what any of it meant and that wasn’t like Kara. Even when they’d been furious with one another, they’d still talked. They’d argued and infuriated one another, but they hadn’t let things go this long before they were settled. Kara didn’t avoid her, at least not successfully. She might show up furious and stubborn, but she showed up eventually.

Maggie straightened, dark eyes concerned as Alex pulled away with a gasp.

“Alex?”

Alex swallowed hard, looked at Maggie mournfully, and felt everything crumble around her. “I can’t,” she said, choking back a sob as realization washed over her, bitter and thick. “I’m married. _Fuck_.”

After a second’s hesitation, Maggie stumbled to her feet, concern wiped from her expression and replaced by an undercurrent of hostility.

“ _Married_?”

Face buried in her hands so she didn’t have to see the way Maggie was looking at her, Alex shook her head. “It’s not… It’s not like that. She’s not from here. It was an accident. A cultural misunderstanding.”

Maggie Sawyer, detective who could detect, took a moment to put it together before she blanched. “Christ. It’s Supergirl.” She backed up even further, as if Supergirl was in the room with them, heat vision kindling.

A second later, Alex’s shirt hit the top of her head.

“You’ve got to go,” Maggie said, eyeing the window nervously, her voice climbing in pitch with each realization. “No wonder she doesn’t like me. She thinks I’m sleeping with her wife. _Fuck_. I was about to sleep with her wife. This is not okay, Danvers. This is not the kind of thing you conveniently forget to mention.”

Alex reached numbly for her shirt. “I didn’t say the words,” she muttered as she pulled it on, talking more to herself than to Maggie. “But what am I supposed to do? Let her be alone forever?” She looked up, jaw clenched, and shook her head sadly. “It wasn’t her fault, but it wasn’t mine either.”

Taking in Alex’s clear distress, Maggie softened. “That all sounds pretty complicated and we can talk about it later, if you want. In public. Right now though…” She trailed off apologetically.

“I got it,” Alex said grimly. “I’m leaving.” She made it to the door before turning. “Promise me you’ll keep this to yourself. I can’t… no one can know about the, you know, married thing.”

“I promise.” Maggie hesitated for a moment then gestured vaguely between herself and Alex. “And maybe you can keep this between us, too.”

“Sure. Of course. She wouldn’t… You don’t have anything to worry about.”

Maggie managed a weak grin. “Your wife could launch me into space. I’d rather not test it.”

\------

Even though she knew better, Alex let it fester. There were so many other things she could have done. Healthy things, like therapy or yoga. Neutral things, like starting and never finishing a home improvement project or taking up a craft she’d never get good at. Even unhealthy things, like dabbling in illegal substances or engaging in a few bar fights. All of those options, and she instead chose to churn through implications and possible outcomes, stewing in anger that rose with every sighting of a still stand-offish Kara.

Kara wanted to make excuses, ignore texts, and spend her time at the DEO using Vasquez or J’onn or any other random team member as a buffer so that she didn’t actually have to have a conversation with Alex? Fine. Alex would make decisions without her.

She was somewhat relieved to find that her key still worked at Kara’s apartment. The chance that it wouldn’t had niggled at her. It would have been the sign of a wound that might not ever heal, Kara suddenly too stubborn and Alex too angry to find a way to make things right. But, her key worked, and she shouldered her way in, a box tucked under one arm and dragging a suitcase behind her. Kara was staring at her from her couch in a panicked half-crouch, like she’d taken too long to decide to speed away.

“Alex?”

Alex dropped the box on the dining room table, abandoned the suitcase, and crossed her arms over her chest. “Oh, so you do remember my name.”

“What are you doing here?”

As much as she liked her new apartment, Alex had always loved the one she’d abandoned in favor of Kara. Returning to it hadn’t been the sole deciding factor, but it had certainly been a positive. “I’m moving in,” she said succinctly, slipping out of her jacket and tossing it over the back of a chair. She toed out of her shoes and pulled her gun from where it was tucked into the small of her back, ejecting the clip and checking the slide before putting it on the small table beside the door.

Kara was up and stalking toward her, jaw and fists clenched, before Alex had time to dig her badge out of her back pocket.

“Alex, you can’t just…”

“We’re married.” The words stopped Kara in her tracks. She stared at Alex, dumbfounded. “We both know it doesn’t matter that you weren’t yourself when you said the words. You said them. They’re binding.”

“For me. Not for you.”

“So I’m your wife but you’re not mine?” Alex shook her head and huffed out an unamused laugh. “If you’re stuck, I’m stuck. That’s just the way it is.”

There was a blur, a flutter of curtains, and Alex found herself standing alone in Kara’s apartment, box and suitcase gone. A second later and Kara was back, looking belligerent but satisfied.

“You took my things back to my place?” she verified.

Kara nodded.

“Okay, so first, I’m going to need to borrow a pair of pajamas. Second, I already broke the lease. The movers are coming this weekend to take most of my things to storage.” She met Kara’s eyes and refused to blink. “I hope you have a spare toothbrush.”

Another flutter of curtains, another blink, and her suitcase was back. It wobbled with residual motion for a second before falling over with a thud, which Alex ignored.

“Why are you doing this?” Kara was a picture of distress in pale blue men’s pajamas, looking between Alex and her suitcase in frustrated betrayal.

Alex wanted to be gentle with her, but between the stress of the situation and the uncertainty of the future, she was wound too tightly for that kind of luxury. “What exactly is your plan for the rest of our lives, Kara? Are you going to petition the non-existent High Council for the Kryptonian equivalent of an annulment?”

“Alex…” The name was a warning.

“Or are we supposed to live out the rest of our lives miserable and alone because of Maxwell Lord’s interference and a stupid misunderstanding that happened when we were _kids_?”

Kara’s eyes flashed with anger. “There’s nothing binding you to me. There never has been. Live your life however you want. Nothing holds you to words that I said.”

“No?” Alex met Kara’s anger with her own. “How exactly am I supposed to do that? I’m tied to you just as much as you’re tied to me. I can’t find love, Kara. I can’t find comfort. I can’t even find sex, apparently. You want to pretend like I can ignore what it means for you to be bonded to me.” She shook her head, clenched her fists, and willed herself to calm. “Like I could ever find happiness knowing that you can’t. Anything I might find would be tainted. I can’t do that to someone else. I can’t do it to myself, and I can’t do it to you. So if we’re married, we’re going to be married. We’ll figure out some way to make it work.”

“I’ve been there and done that, Alex.” Kara’s face went as cold as it had been on the night that caused all of this trouble. “I’m not interested.”

“Well, too bad—” Alex grabbed the handle of her suitcase with a look that dared Kara to block her path—“ _wife_.”

\------

Kara had always been so careful with her anger. Her anger was destructive to an order of magnitude greater than what the people and things around her could absorb. It broke things, incinerated things, left smoking craters and mangled ruins in its wake. Red K had taken the dampener off of her higher functioning for little more than a day, and it was more than enough to leave her life in shambles. She’d nearly killed her boss and mentor. She’d left most of an elite DEO team unconscious and injured. She’d been a hair’s breadth away from having sex with Alex against her will.

She’d irrevocably shackled herself to someone who had never and would never want her.

The antidote had brought her back to a world filled with sorrow and rage. She’d always stood in there, taking every punch life had thrown at her, but even Supergirl had a limit. Kara Danvers certainly did, and when she wasn’t torturing herself with what she had almost done, she had the luxury of torturing herself with the fallout of what she’d actually done. She’d taken something sacred and made it profane, and was no less bound to the promise she’d made in spite of that.

Earth wasn’t Krypton. Earth wouldn’t hold her to the divine, inviolable tenets of a dead world. It didn’t cling tight to constancy in the same way Krypton had. Earth, or at least her adopted corner of it, was accepting of mistakes and miscalculations. Lifelong commitment was respected and honored when it happened, but humans seemed to have accepted it as something of increasing rarity. Most didn’t expect people to be miserable together just for the sake of convention. Clark had said the same words she had, had made the same promises, but Kara suspected that if his marriage broke in a way that couldn’t be fixed, he wouldn’t cling to the old ways. He would walk away from them, and another piece of Krypton would die. If that happened, she wouldn’t begrudge him. _Earth wasn’t Krypton_. There were no Houses. People joined together for many reasons, but most of them were rooted in some kind of love. Even then, she was well aware that love alone wasn’t always enough to save something.

Maybe it was foolish, letting this lingering remnant of a world she could never rejoin bind her. In the end, they were only words – words that had meaning to her in a way literally no one else could understand. If she walked away from them, who was left to scorn her for it? No one. She had to wonder if maybe they’d been woven into her DNA when the birthing matrix put her together, implanted along with everything that made her who she was, because she just _couldn’t_. She couldn’t walk away without leaving something vital of herself behind.

So she’d mourned again, much the same way she had when she’d come to realize that Alex wasn’t her intended. In some ways, it was easier. She’d never quite gotten over the first heartbreak, even if she’d managed to bury it deep inside. The second was simply the closing act of the tragic comedy of misunderstandings and errors that had started when she’d first landed on Earth. She had evolved to accept and ultimately desire what would be required of her in a relationship with a human only to have that relationship shatter to pieces in front of her. By her own hand in the latter instance, because some part of her couldn’t accept that someone she’d thought was hers had never been, and when left unrestrained, had laid claim.

It didn’t matter that Alex made apologies for and discounted Kara’s actions. It didn’t matter that Alex wanted to pretend it hadn’t happened or that it didn’t matter. Kara needed time to grieve anew, and she couldn’t do that in the midst of sister’s nights and status quo. She couldn’t do it in plain sight of the clear attraction between Alex and the NCPD detective, Maggie Sawyer, either.

And how capricious and malicious was fate? She’d spent half her life loving Alex, aware of the futility of it, because even if Alex understood and accepted the bond Kara had been led to believe was inevitable between them, she wasn’t so inclined. Only, apparently all it had taken was to bind herself to Alex forever, irrevocably, for Alex to open herself up to flirtation with _another_ woman.

So she wasn’t exactly in the best of places when Alex stormed into her apartment, angry and resolute, to commit them to a life of miserableness together. It felt like a punishment, like the universe getting in one last dig at her expense before leaving her to twist in the wind. Alex’s toothbrush took up residence beside her own. She had to make room for Alex’s clothes and books, for her gun safe and work boots. A new blend of coffee appeared in her cabinet and a new blanket draped itself across the back of her couch.

And Alex… Alex claimed one half of her bed with a ferocious vengeance, like committing wholeheartedly to a bad plan would make up for its obvious deficiencies. Even though she liked sleep, it was a good thing Kara didn’t really need it. Alex’s dedication to the farce of pretending at the broad strokes of marriage in abstract left what had been a place of solace a locus of tension and repressed, pointless fury. Things were worse than they’d been when they were teenagers and Alex was mindlessly, viciously angry at everything but especially at her. Each interaction felt like it was a single spark away from roaring into heated words and hurt feelings.

“Let’s order in,” Alex would say, and Kara would feel the words like nails on a chalkboard. Innocuous but insidious, as if they could pretend that nothing had changed. As if Alex could move in and treat it like an indefinite sister’s night, like a never-ending sleepover. Delivery and tv and Alex’s socked feet on her couch as she tucked herself into one corner, her unstinting determination to make everything normal laying over them like a heavy, stifling blanket. Tension that stretched until Alex grew sour with it, this inability to fix something that was never going to be fixable. So she’d pour herself a glass of whiskey and stare out through Kara’s massive windows, watching the National City nightlife as if trying to figure out how her own life had gotten lost. She’d rub at her forehead, trying to soothe a headache that was never going to be soothed, and go to bed a little drunk, a little angry, and a little lost.

Or, Alex with a laundry basket on one hip, standing in front of her. “You have anything you want to add?” It was a pantomime of domesticity, of the partnership a much younger Kara had thought they might have one day. She’d pictured… ridiculous things, really. Perfect jobs and the perfect apartment and evenings spent with their heads bowed close, solving each other’s problems in fond murmurs. She’d seen it, like a cinematic pan out to reveal the two of them in a circle of soft light – each other’s world and each other’s defense against the world. It was laughable, or would have been if it hadn’t hurt so much. Now-Kara didn’t even want her _laundry_ to mingle with Alex’s, to create a self-contained world that intermixed in a way her own world couldn’t – their socks more intimate than they were.

If not cast in a replacement lead role in increasingly blurred childhood memories of possible futures, at least Alex could have lived up to the boogeyman Kara had spent her first few years on Earth thinking she’d one day be. She could have pulled Kara into bed, hands slipping under clothing to lay her bare. She could have shown her pleasure again and again until Kara was weak with it, until every last reservation, hang-up, and fear was a laughable remnant of a purity unmade. She could have stripped away the last vestiges of Kryptonian restraint, leaving her free of the weight of it. Sometimes Kara had dreams of it, of Alex storming into her apartment with her suitcase and that damned box under her arm, growling that if they were married then they were going to be married in every way. And she’d kiss her, because Kara had kissed Alex but Alex had never kissed back, and even under all of the shame and regret, she wanted to know what it’d be like. She wanted to be wanted, as a partner or a lover or anything, really, other than lifetime cohabitant.

She couldn’t figure out why Alex was so set on something that was making them both so miserable, or why she refused to accept that no part of anything that had happened had trapped her into it. She was suffering without reason, and dragging Kara even farther down with her.

Thanksgiving was a disaster. Kara gave up on hiding the liquor and skirted all of Eliza’s confused questions. They grew, from _Is something going on_ to _Is there something I need to know_ to _Whenever you girls are ready_ _to talk, I’m here_. When cornered, she gave half-hearted, transparently inadequate answers, because what value was served by the truth? One small mistake had compounded into many, and Alex was apparently determined to join in and multiply her misery.

Hanukkah was better only because Eliza didn’t visit. Alex steadily drank her way through it and the rest of the year, ignoring Kara’s huffs of frustration and the simmering, building tension that grew day by day. She’d pass out in their bed, reeking of alcohol, and sometimes, when her self-loathing and dissatisfaction with life was at its most obvious, she’d curl into Kara like she had before everything had gone so very wrong. She’d start sentences she’d never finish, _Do you remember_ … trailing off with a wistful sigh. _I wonder what would have happened if…_

Kara’s apathy and depression bled out like an overturned inkwell, a messy spread with no real direction or boundary. She played an award worthy version of Sunny Danvers at work and smiled at grateful citizens as Supergirl and spent the rest of her time a lost little girl from a functionally extinct race, thinking _This is it? Forever?_

And then, because there was no reason not to, she willfully agreed to make it worse.


	5. An Illicit Affair

If she’d had the foresight, Alex would have set up a row of adorable teddy bears holding heart-shaped boxes full of candy and shot each and every one of them through the heart with an expertly placed .45 caliber bullet. She’d made it through the holidays and her mother’s suspicious, probing questions and the growing iciness in Kara’s eyes, but this… this was too much. She couldn’t turn around without being plunged into a syrupy world of romance and love. Giddy, new love. Anxious, yearning love. Stalwart, comfortable love. Even rote, performative love. Out of all of the holidays, Valentine’s Day was the one determined to finally do her in.

She was on her second glass of whiskey when Kara flew through the window, padded softly into their shared space, and looked her over with thinly veiled antipathy.

“You’re drunk.”

Alex clapped slowly, mockingly, every last filter finally obliterated and replaced by something dangerously reckless. “Supergirl, ladies and gentlemen. The world’s greatest detective.”

“I’m not talking to you when you’re like this.”

“Like what? I’m just trying to find a way to accept my new reality, Kara.” Alex finished off the rest of her tumbler and slammed it onto the table. She pushed to her feet, full of a kinetic energy that left her trembling and in search of an outlet.

Kara gestured at her tiredly, pulling ineffectually at the clasp holding her cape in place. “Like this. No one’s forcing you to be here, Alex. This isn’t making anything any better. I set you free a long time ago.”

“Set me free,” Alex echoed derisively, months of creeping depression, frustration, and futility released suddenly and viciously, set free by the mocking of heart-shaped boxes of candy and taunting of roadside stands crowded with flowers wrapped in cellophane. “Yeah, you set me free, and then you put me right back in a box. I was finally figuring things out. Finally. All those years of mediocre, unsatisfying relationships made sense when I realized I was gay. I wasn’t the problem. I was playing in the wrong sandbox. That’s all. And you… you started it. You kissed me, and it was good. That’s the worst part. If I hadn’t figured it out… If I hadn’t realized… All that time spent confused and unhappy, and all I needed was for a girl to kiss me.”

She rubbed a hand over her face, over eyes bloodshot and red from exhaustion. “And then I met Maggie, and for, like, three weeks, it was good. It was so good. I thought I had something. I thought I might have a personal life for once. Someone to come home to who wasn’t my sister. I thought I might actually really, truly enjoy sex for once.” She laughed humorlessly. “But how could I? How could I when you were miserable, Kara? When you were alone? When it didn’t matter if I didn’t say the words because you had, and that made it real for you? Now I’m stuck and you’re stuck. No getting out of this one.”

For a moment, Kara was left speechless because it was all so very deeply unfair.

“I didn’t ask for this either.” Kara took a step forward, bringing herself to within touching distance of Alex. “I didn’t ask for my world to be destroyed. I didn’t ask to be sent here, to this primitive planet, and given to someone who never even wanted me. From what I could see, all humans cared about was finding someone or something to rut against.”

She took another step forward, forcing Alex to look up to meet her eyes. “How do you think I felt, when I thought I was promised to one of you? The thought of myself ever wanting something like that… It was humiliating. Do you understand? But it was a new world. New rules. I accepted them. I learned. And I… I fell in love with you. I came to want it, all of the things humans do with one another. I wanted it, Alex. I _craved_ it. I desired you. I would have let you… _I wanted it._ So, what does that make me? An embarrassment to Krypton’s memory? An abomination?”

“Yeah, I remember what you wanted,” Alex snarled, remembering Kara’s anger under Red K and her certainty that Alex was _hers_. “An obedient little wife who would fall into line.”

“I wanted you to walk by my side!”

Alex looked at her flatly. “You wanted to fuck me.”

“So what if I did? That’s what I am now, right? Human enough to want that.”

Alex reached for the hem of her shirt, drawing it over her head and tossing it aside defiantly. “So fuck me.” She spread her hand over the symbol on Kara’s chest and pushed. “Maybe this is what we need.”

And Kara wanted. She just… wanted.

She’d kissed others, though not many. They’d been attempts to find some sort of consolation, morbid curiosity and fruitless hope that maybe there was someone other than Alex who would make her feel the way Alex had. With Alex’s fingers in her hair and Alex’s lips on hers, she realized how pointless it had all been. Everything about Alex spoke to her of home. The feel of her skin, her smell, the give of her under Kara’s touch. Without second thought, Kara slid her hands under Alex’s thighs and hoisted her up. She kissed past the lingering sting of whiskey, on and on in ever deepening layers, until Alex was rocking her hips and moaning, fingers digging into Kara with a delicious pleasure and legs wrapped tight around her waist. She wasn’t angry anymore. Couldn’t be, not when Alex’s tongue brushed against Kara’s own in a perfect balance between soft and demanding. Not when Alex broke away to catch her breath, eyes dark and dazed. Not when her lips were swollen and wet and she was looking at Kara in surprise. Looking at her like she couldn’t believe how right it felt either.

“I want to touch you.” Alex pulled at the fastenings holding her suit together, not able to focus long enough to make any real headway. She shook her head, trying to think through the sudden, overwhelming tide of longing that swept over her, and gave up with a look of mingled desire and acceptance. She drew her thumb across Kara’s bottom lip and followed it up with her teeth. Kara tried not to squeeze too tightly, tried to stay present and careful, but Alex was looking at her like she wanted her to forget about all of that.

Kara stumbled, not even aware she’d been moving until she tripped over a chair leg and sent them careening into a wall. She drove a handprint into the drywall and Alex separated from her with a startled _oof_ , but Kara kissed her again before she could say anything else. She kissed her until she’d driven Alex beyond the capacity to reason, along the curve of her ear and the expanse of her neck and back to lips left tender and bruised. She tasted her in a way that made a mockery of the hints she’d gotten as a hopeless, desperate teenager, when she’d brought her own fingertips to her mouth in the hopes that something of Alex’s skin would have lingered. She pressed her lips to Alex’s pulse point and felt that familiar heartbeat as a wild, erratic tattoo. A heartbeat driven out of its usual, calm cadence because of her, and the way she was making Alex feel, and she understood, in a visceral way, why humans were so enamored of sex and its many antecedents and ancillaries. She’d never felt more powerful or more vulnerable, given permission to everything but only if she shared everything of her own in return.

She didn’t chance the floor again, floating just high enough off of it to be out of the range of obstacles, and laid Alex on the bed gently. Alex, beautiful and wild in rumpled sheets and scant light, stared up at her as she hovered, pushing her uniform down and off at human speed because she needed the time. Needed to know, to be sure.

“You want this?” she asked, gently dropping a boot to the floor and trying desperately to ignore how uncomfortably aware of her nakedness she was. “You want me?”

Alex nodded sharply. Kara’s sensitive ears picked up the rustle of sheets as Alex arched her hips and pushed impatiently at the waistband of her pants. She felt her heart speed up in anticipation, thumping _finally, finally, finally_. “I need this. I need to know, Kara. Please.”

When she settled gingerly atop Alex, skin to skin, she couldn’t help noticing how fragile Alex was. How breakable. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

 As always, Alex was recklessly brave. “I don’t care if you do.”

“I care.”

She drew her nails down Kara’s back. “You won’t,” she promised, eyes closed as she wrapped her legs around Kara’s hips once again, arching into her even as she drew her down. “I’ve missed this.”

Kara tried to raise up on her elbows, to take some of her weight off of Alex, but Alex wouldn’t let her.

“Don’t,” she said, sliding her calves down along Kara’s thighs and planting the soles of her feet against the mattress, arms wrapped tight around Kara’s neck. “I’ve always… I like it, you on top of me like this.”

With a little coaxing, she guided Kara so that their legs were intertwined, with Kara’s thigh pressed tight between her legs. She moved in a rhythm set by the dig of Alex’s nails into the curve of her ass, Alex hot and wet against her with each thrust forward. Kara felt dizzy, feverish with it. Alex’s breasts were pressed against her own, and she wanted to take them in her hands. She wanted to map the shape and size of them and learn their weight. She wanted to take Alex’s skin in her mouth, against her tongue, between her teeth, but it was all she could do to stay in the moment. She buried her face in Alex’s neck, elbows braced against the mattress as she rocked against Alex.

She shivered as Alex panted against her ear, each exhale marking the flex of her hips. Her breath was hot, curling its way over and through Kara’s skin in a way that was almost more than Kara could stand. She could feel Alex’s heartbeat, could hear it. Could feel the wet of her sweat and the wet of her excitement, and it was everything and more than she’d expected. The texture of Alex’s hair, the texture of her skin, the way her nipples hardened and her muscles flexed – for all of the explorations of their youth, nothing had prepared Kara for the actuality of lovemaking.

“I want you inside me,” Alex breathed, and Kara discovered something new, something that transcended the sensory overload of Alex against her. Alex around her, hot and wet and clinging to her fingers, was almost too much. She froze, trying to catalogue the sensations, but Alex was past the point of patience. She thrust her hips against Kara in a way that was almost frantic, the sounds she was making needy and desperate. Kara forced herself to match Alex’s pace, rewarded immediately by the way Alex clung to her as if seeking something to tether her. She became aware of Alex’s hand bumping against hers, awkward in the tight fit between their bodies, and realized Alex was touching herself with tight, directed strokes. After a moment’s observation, feeling the rhythm in the way Alex’s fingers brushed against her palm, she mimicked it with her thumb. Alex gasped and surged up against her, digging her fingers into the muscles of Kara’s bicep, made reactive and insensate and it was all her doing, Kara realized.

Alex’s heart was beating urgently, like a horse at full gallop. “Don’t stop,” she whispered, over and over again, and Kara didn’t. She tried to figure out a way to provide everything at once, the pressure of her thumb against Alex’s clit and the motion of her fingers inside her. It was awkward and ungainly until it wasn’t and when it all fell into place, Alex held her tightly and shivered against her and made a sound so wanton and needy that Kara clenched in reflex.

She gentled her movements but didn’t stop, and Alex continued to shiver and continued to gasp. She buried her fingers in Kara’s hair and pulled hard until Kara’s face came up out of its hiding place and Alex was kissing her. It was messy, desperate and a little unfocused, and Kara felt an undeniable wave of pride. For all of her hang-ups, insecurities, and inexperience, she’d still managed to drive Alex to this.

Soon, Alex’s hand found her wrist, pushing against it weakly. “No more. I can’t. I can’t. Kara, please. _Please_.”

Kara waited for the shame, but it couldn’t compare to the feeling of Alex in her arms, chest moving with increasing regularity against her own as Alex’s heartbeat returned to normal. She pressed her lips to Alex’s neck and tasted sweat against her tongue.

She felt euphoric, sure there was no better feeling, until Alex proved her wrong.

When Alex rolled them over and began working her way down Kara’s body, Kara gripped the sheets hard enough to tear through the fabric. Alex’s tongue was a warm rasp against her nipples. Suction brought an involuntary cry from deep in her chest. She nearly begged Alex to stop, sure she couldn’t take any more, but couldn’t bring herself to be the cause of the end of the way Alex was making her feel. Later, when Alex’s mouth was between her legs, when she worked a finger inside and applied pressure in a way that made her keen, Kara had to force her legs to stay parted because all she wanted to do was wrap herself around Alex and keep her there forever.

“You’re doing so good,” Alex murmured as she drew her palm over one long thigh, feeling the muscles tremble under her touch. “It’s okay. Let go. You’re not going to hurt me.”

She slid her hands under Kara’s thighs and pushed up. It took Kara longer than it should have to understand what Alex wanted, but it was a relief to draw her knees up to her chest and wrap her arms under them, hands clasped together and locking them into place, because she wasn’t sure she would have been able to control herself without the additional help. Relief soon gave way to desperation. She was so open, at Alex’s mercy. Exposed and vulnerable, and Alex, ever the scientist, took her time. She catalogued the nuances of Kara’s responses, to each fluctuation in pressure and speed. To the difference between the pad of her thumb and the flat of her tongue, to being teased and to being spread open and devoured.

Kara had brought herself to orgasm before, curious and embarrassed in equal measure, but not in a way that could have prepared her for this – Alex’s tongue against her clit and finger clenched tight inside her. Her release caught her by surprise, intense and overpowering, and Kara struggled to stay anchored. Her breath caught and her chest began to hitch, and when Alex noticed, she climbed upward, pulling Kara into her. “It’s okay,” she said, pressing kisses to the underside of Kara’s jaw and holding her to her even as Kara clung desperately, wrung out, exhausted, and overwhelmed. “Everything’s going to be fine. I’ve got you. I’m here. You’re okay. I’m going to take care of you. You’re okay.”

She fell asleep to the sound of Alex’s promises, tears caught in her lashes and Alex’s hair tickling her lips.

\------

And so she began an illicit affair with ~~her~~ ~~sister~~ … ~~her~~ ~~wife~~ … Alex.

The marks it left on Alex were visible. Bruises around her wrists, at her neck, along the slip of her back, dug into her inner thighs and painted along the curve of her breasts. She didn’t mean to leave them behind, but Alex keened into her whenever Kara held her tightly and to not felt like a denial. Days passed in a delirium. She learned what Alex looked like kneeling above her face, on her knees before her, bent over and braced against her hands as Kara pressed into her from behind. She saw Alex in her DEO uniform and knew what she looked like naked and tangled in their sheets, sated and sleepy. Saw her stern-faced and serious as she directed her team and knew what she looked like undone and wanton. She knew the weight of her as she fucked her against a wall and the rhythm of her hips as she straddled Kara’s waist and took her fingers. She knew every square inch of skin, and was known in return.

Her own marks were hidden. Alex drank less and talked more, but there was a space between them filled with loaded silences and a messy sort of sexual tension. All arguments, all disagreements, all ambiguities had a new solution. There seemed to be no need to work through things if they could be fucked through instead. Lingering frustrations were taken out in flesh, sometimes quickly and sometimes not. She yearned for the lost ease of their relationship before Red K, when she could pull Alex into a hug they could both relax into, finding comfort and affection and love. Now she was lucky to get five counts of Alex melting into her before the tension sprang up. She’d either be pushed away in a way that looked but didn’t feel playful or feel Alex’s teeth nipping against her skin, a warning of its own. _This is the only way you’re allowed to love me_ , it seemed to say, and Kara was growing tired of taking what she could get.

“Have you thought about changing your paperwork?” she asked over dinner one night, shoulders tensing as silence fell. She looked up to find Alex blinking at her owlishly, chopsticks suspended halfway to her mouth.

“At work,” Kara forced herself to say at Alex’s look of confusion. “Change your name. Your benefits. Whatever it is that you change after you get married.”

Alex gave a choked, wheezing laugh. “We’re not exactly married by Earth standards, Kara.” She dropped her chopsticks back into their box and ran a hand through her hair, looking at Kara with mixed exasperation and amusement. “Do you want me to put you on my insurance? I’m pretty sure my plan doesn’t cover Kryptonite related injuries. Can you picture the risk analysts in Benefits trying to wrap their heads around that?”

“Your name, then,” Kara growled.

“We already have the same name.”

An Earth name, she wanted to say, with no place in it for her heritage.

Seeing her frustration, Alex softened. “It’s not exactly subtle, adding the House of El. Alex Danvers-El. That’s what you called me that day.” She bit her lip, oddly pensive, and reached out to take Kara’s hand. “If you want to, when it’s just us, you can use it.”

A barely symbolic gesture no one could see outside of their apartment felt a little too symbolic of their relationship overall.

“We never have people over,” she said another night, Alex draped across her like an exhausted, naked blanket.

The reply was muffled against Kara’s chest. “How exactly do you plan to explain the fact that we only have one bed?”

“I think it’s pretty self-explanatory, actually.”

“Oh yeah? What’s the explanation.”

Kara frowned down at the top of Alex’s head. “That we’re together. That we’re bonded.”

“So you’re going to tell everybody about how you got high on Red K and put a ring on it neither of us can take off?” She looked up, chin balanced on Kara’s breastbone. “People are going to ask how, Kara. They’re going to want to know our romantic backstory.”

“I’m an alien who had to cross galaxies to find you. You don’t think that’s romantic enough?”

Alex snorted and stretched up to place a kiss against Kara’s chin. “I think it’s a slight exaggeration.”

She screwed up her courage, heart skipping a beat. “Is it though?” she asked, her voice not as confident as she would have liked.

“Kara…” Alex rolled off of her so that she was sitting on the edge of the bed. She fished a shirt off of the floor and pulled it on and some part of Kara mourned the loss of her skin. “I know you think you love me that way, but you never knew you had any other choice. You resigned yourself to the only option you thought you had, and now… well, I _am_ the only option you have. But Kara, you can’t tell me that with the whole wide world available to you, you would have picked me.”

“I can,” Kara said stubbornly. “I would have. I did.”

“I’m honored that you think so.” Alex turned to look over her shoulder, eyes dark, sad. “I really am. But what you think you feel for me? If Clark hadn’t messed everything up the day he brought you to us, it never would have happened. You can’t build a life on a misunderstanding. Neither can I. You’re my family. I love you. I will always love you, and now we have this, whatever it is.” She gestured between them. “That’s more than enough, isn’t it?”

“Is it enough for you? Is it really enough?” Kara pulled the discarded sheet up over her chest. “One of us is lying, Alex. Is it me or is it you?”

She watched as Alex’s spine stiffened and her expression turned cold. “I’m being a realist, Kara.”

She wanted to call after Alex as she left the bed, to say she was being a coward, but she wasn’t sure it was the truth. She wanted to wind the words back in, to forget that there was a perfect world forever just outside her reach, where Alex loved her back. Where it didn’t matter that mistakes had been made, or that they hadn’t had the luxury of perfect beginnings. Where she wasn’t a cage Alex had resigned herself to decorating with the trappings of home, playing at a relationship she’d never believe in. Where she didn’t have to wonder how many more cracks the façade could handle before shattering.

Where she didn’t have to worry that, when it came to shattering, she might already be there.


	6. Concussion Ex-Machina

On the day it all ended, Kara called Clark.

“Just fly over,” she said, pushing the window open wide. “I need you to do something for me, okay? Please.”

Minutes later he landed with a soft thump that alerted a half-absent Alex, who looked up quizzically from where she was skimming through a book on the couch. “Hey, Clark,” she said, setting it aside and looking to Kara to check that she hadn’t somehow forgotten plans even as she gave Clark a loose side-hug.

A look Kara didn’t, couldn’t, return.

In her peripheral vision, Alex straightened, suddenly on guard. She looked from Kara to Clark, clearly confused and already wary and alert. Sensing that something wasn’t quite right, perhaps, with all of her DEO training put to work to suss out what. “Kara,” she said, a soft and plaintive entreaty, and Kara had to force herself to not react. “What’s going on?”

Clark seemed startled by the possibility that he’d been summoned for an actual reason, and for a serious one at that, and it wasn’t long before he was wearing a concerned frown that matched Alex’s. “Is something wrong?”

 _Everything’s wrong_ , she wanted to say, but it was best not to complicate things even further. Some things had to be done quickly and cleanly, and this was one of them.

Kara took in a deep breath and kept her eyes focused on the space in front of her, intensely aware of Alex despite all of the energy she was expending not to be. “Kal-El, of the House of El, as the only other descendent of Krypton, you’re the only one left to adjudicate this.” She looked up and locked eyes with Clark, silently willing him to play his part. “With great sorrow, I call you here to declare my bondmate unworthy. I ask you to unbind two who should never have been bound.”

Clark looked at her in slack-jawed shock, a dozen questions writ clear in his expression. “Your bondmate? Alex is your bondmate? Since when?” When it became clear he wasn’t going to get an answer – Kara stonily silent and Alex shocked into speechlessness – his voice turned soft. “Kara, what exactly are you asking me to do?”

Kara pushed forward, not sure she’d be able to continue if she stopped to explain. She needed to do this. Had to do it. Couldn’t live like she had been any longer, captor and captive both, so she abandoned shame and said as clearly as she could, “She doesn’t return my love.”

Beside her, Alex made a broken, desperate sound.

“She cannot share my burdens and troubles.” A tear streaked down her cheek and she let it, sure that even if she wiped it away, more would follow. “She is not committed to the betterment of this House. She stands apart, not together. There can be no honor in this bond if she doesn’t walk beside me in Rao’s light.”

Clark looked between them, bewildered and so very, very sad. “Alex,” he asked softly, “is this true?”

She startled when Alex moved, and nearly flew straight out of the still opened window when she came to face her. “Is this what you want?” she asked as she reached up to brush away Kara’s tears, voice hoarse. Her own eyes were wide, mournful, and wet with her own tears. She was unfairly beautiful in her unexpected melancholy, and Kara’s heart ached with sudden, sharp anger for all that could have been. “Kara, is it?”

Kara shrugged, unable to confirm something she didn’t mean. She fought not to lean into Alex’s touch, into the soft fingers still resting lightly against her cheek. “I want you to find someone whose love you can believe in. I deserve more, Alex. So do you.”

For a long moment, she watched as Alex struggled to find words. She watched with the intensity of someone memorizing the face of the one they loved most, like a departing traveler unsure they would ever return. She watched the play of muscles and tendons as Alex swallowed and the ripple of her jaw as she bit down hard, trapping whatever she might have said behind her teeth. Kara wanted to kiss away the furrow creasing her brow and the wistful frown on her lips and forget she’d ever been the cause of the sadness and regret in Alex’s dark eyes. She wanted to rewind time, to have a tentative, nervous first kiss on the roof under the stars.

She focused on Clark, unable to bear the sight of Alex’s gathering tears. “Kal-El, what is your ruling?”

“Kara, I can’t… I’m not…”

She stiffened, unwilling to let him avoid this duty. For a moment, they stood in opposition – the last two children of Krypton, locked in a battle of wills. “You are all that is left. Set her free.”

In the interstice, something in Alex’s expression hardened. She nodded, as if accepting her fate, and stepped alongside Kara, running her hand down Kara’s arm and twining their fingers together in a way so familiar and soothing that Kara had to close her eyes to hide its effect on her.

“She’s right,” Alex said, her voice clear and tight. “I’m unworthy. Everything she said… it’s true. I bring no honor to this bond.”

Even though she’d brought them to that point, Kara wanted to protest. She wanted to point to all of the times Alex had saved her, all of the times she’d been the rock upon which Kara could break. Alex had risked her life for Kara over and over again. She’d been Kara’s home in this world, which was why it had to be done. She had to let her go, to sever their tie as clearly and neatly as she could, so that Alex could find a home of her own.

“Do it, Clark,” Alex snapped, something in her coiled into something dark and dangerous. “Give her this, at least.”

Clark looked between them, miserable and unwilling but caught between two unbending wills. He wanted to ask why. He wanted to ask how, and how he hadn’t known. He didn’t know how he had missed it before or what he was missing now, because the two women standing in front of him and demanding to be separated from one another were in love. It was painfully obvious now that he knew to look. “I declare you unworthy of your bond, Alex Danvers,” he said weakly, each word carrying the weight of a mistake. “You are no longer a member of the House of El, not that I ever knew you were.”

Alex’s chest was too tight to release the sob trapped deep within. She looked at Kara, distraught to find that she looked just as anguished as Alex felt. But what Kara had just done couldn’t be misinterpreted. They were finished, over, and it was time for Alex to go.

“I’m sorry,” she said wordlessly before moving on autopilot, letting go of Kara’s hand and leaving the apartment and everything in it behind.

\------

Alex stayed in a hotel until she found a new apartment. She had her things pulled out of storage, but there was no comfort of familiarity in them. It hadn’t been that long that she’d been gone, not in the grand scheme of things, but nothing attached itself to the things that repopulated her space. There were no memories, no fond moments, just the same absence of life that pervaded her new home. She slept in a cold, empty bed and brewed enough coffee for one. There was no bustle of cohabitating life as she readied for work, no one grinning at her as she searched for her keys. She went to work and was as professional as she could manage and then she came home to a lonely, sterile apartment.

She pulled out a bottle of whiskey and a tumbler, but she didn’t drink. She stared at a blank tv as evening closed in around her. She cried, sometimes silently, sometimes not.

Kara watched, hidden away in the National City sky.

Time passed, and Alex became increasingly drawn and gaunt. The dark smudges under her eyes never seemed to go away and couldn’t be hidden, not even under a layer of concealer. She kept to herself but offered Kara a smile every time she saw her, some shakier than others. She was nothing but polite and deferential to Supergirl, and if she looked at her with a longing that made others uncomfortable, no one mentioned it. She trained and she fought and she spent hours in the lab, her dedication remarkable even by the standards she usually set.

Kara ached for her. She tried to do the right thing, even when it hurt, because Alex deserved all of the things she couldn’t find with her. “It’s okay,” she’d told Maggie Sawyer, pulling her aside at a crime scene and swallowing down her pride. “We’re not together like that anymore. If you want to call Alex and ask her out, you can.”

It hadn’t worked out the way she’d intended, because Maggie had studied her for a long moment before wrapping her up in a hug. It had been so sudden and unexpected that Kara hadn’t been able to stem the rising tide of emotion and after that, they just never mentioned the time Kara had cried her heart out on the periphery of a crime scene, fingers digging a little too hard into Maggie’s back.

She tried not to be jealous when Maggie coaxed Alex out to the alien bar. She tuned her hearing to Alex’s heartbeat, and if she heard other things, well…

“No thanks,” she heard Alex say, when Maggie asked if she could grab her a beer. “She, uh… she doesn’t like it when I drink too much.”

And Maggie tried with all of the skill of a seasoned investigator to get the story out of Alex, or at least to offer her the opportunity to vent, but Alex’s answers ranged a narrow path.

“So what happened?”

_It was all my fault._

“Do you love her?"

_What does it matter? It’s too late._

“What if it’s not too late?”

_It was all my fault._

“What if you could fix it?”

_What does it matter? It’s too late._

Kara wanted a lot of things, but one of the things she wanted the most for was Alex to be okay. She wanted Alex to find a love that made her happy, but Alex didn’t seem to be finding anything other than ever deepening solitude. She pushed friends into her path – Vasquez, Lucy, J’onn – and contemplated calling Eliza, but Alex was masterful with big, empty smiles and equally empty reassurances. But Kara… Kara knew her inside and out. She watched with growing helplessness as Alex buried herself in her work, always available for dangerous missions or special ops extractions. The bruises changed, no longer from a love that held a bit too tight but instead the imprints of fists and flying debris deflected by the fragile weave of Kevlar. She was a protector who was too busy to protect herself.

She thought about talking to J’onn, but Alex would never forgive her if she interfered. Part of her wondered if it would matter, since Alex seemed intent on never really talking to her about anything important ever again. At least she’d be safe, though, which sometimes seemed like enough. But no, she’d already changed the course of Alex’s life too many times. Instead, she’d keep watch as she always had.

\------

One second Alex was watching Supergirl’s back as she responded to an emergency call about a fire-breathing alien and the next she was laying into an Infernian in a full flying tackle, causing the heat vision that she’d been directing toward Supergirl to arc into the pavement. A second later and an angry Infernian was crouched over her, ripping her helmet off and tossing it to the side even as she dug her hands into Alex’s neck. Her eyes began to shimmer again and Alex brought her hands up and inside the Infernian’s hold, driving her forearms into her elbows and causing the Infernian to pitch forward, losing her hold. Alex met her halfway, snapping her forehead into the alien’s nose with vicious satisfaction. It felt good to be fighting, to be doing something other than ruminating over all of the mistakes she’d made. It felt good to be protecting Kara again, because no matter what else Alex had done, she hadn’t yet failed at that. She might have been unworthy of the love Kara had given her, but she’d do everything in her power to make sure Kara was safe.

She planted a foot on the pavement and slid her hips sideways and out, managing to slip out from under the Infernian’s full weight. It was almost enough to be clear but not quite, and Alex’s head hit the pavement with a crack as she took a fist to the cheek. Another to the mouth left the taste of blood on her tongue and she scrambled to plant her foot again, ready to buck up and shift out at the same time once again.

She’d just braced her forearm against the Infernian’s chest when the woman disappeared, lifted off of her as if she was a piece of lint and slammed back into the pavement a few feet to Alex’s left. She looked up, trying not to gag as a dizzy vertigo swirled through her, to see Supergirl with her foot planted on the Infernian’s upper back, something in her eyes wild.

“Stay down,” Supergirl snarled at Alex’s erstwhile attacker even as her eyes flitted nervously over the wounds on Alex’s face.

Alex gave her a bloody, woozy smile and a weak thumbs up, because Supergirl had more important things to handle. She rolled over slowly, getting her hands beneath her to try and leverage herself into a kneeling position, but her arms suddenly felt like jelly. She tried again, getting so far as her elbows before losing the ability to tell up from down.

In the background, from far away, she heard Kara shouting something about medical attention, and Alex agreed it would probably be a good idea. Her ears were ringing and a cut on her cheek seemed to be bleeding profusely, if the small pool gathering under her face was any indication.

She came to in a medical transport to someone rubbing her arm. “Just a little prick,” the tech reassured her, and Alex’s face scrunched up as the needle plunged into her arm. Seconds later, she felt the first tendrils of relief and sank into the familiar comfort of one of the DEO’s specialized analgesic concoctions. The pain in her face dulled to a distant, disconnected throb and she grinned.

“Good stuff,” she slurred, eyelids fluttering closed.

The tech snapped his fingers in her face. “Stay awake.” Alex wanted to slap his hand away but couldn’t quite seem to get her arm in the right quadrant before the tech caught it, easing it down gently to the gurney. “Supergirl said to take special care of you, Agent Danvers, and I’m not about to let her down.”

Right. Supergirl. Kara, who probably still loved her even though she’d fucked everything up. Maybe not loved her like she had before, but Alex deserved that. Their bond was a promise made before Rao, and Kara had _broken_ it. Broken something that had meant so much to her that she’d been prepared to live the rest of her life in solitude. Because Alex had been so stubborn, so sure of everything, and so wrong. Because she’d refused to risk her heart. Because she’d chosen the safety of self-denial over the free-falling terror of love, and Kara had left her and she’d deserved it. She’d broken something sacred – one of Kara’s last connections to Krypton; their small corner of family; the life they could have had.

It turned out no one challenged Agent Danvers, not if she managed to slip out of the medbay before anyone could catch her.

She was still punch drunk when she let herself into the room with the AI of Kara’s mother and called her into being.

“Alexandra Danvers,” Alura said to the human who’d put her back together, pleasantly even tempered and unbothered by having been awoken to find someone other than Kara standing in front of her.

“You’re proud of Kara, right?” Alex blurted out, swaying slightly in place. “Of what she’s done? Who she is?”

The AI of Alura smiled brightly. “I have no reason to believe I would be anything other than proud of my daughter.”

Alex nodded, because she wouldn’t, couldn’t have been anything else. “I was your daughter-in-law for a little while,” she tried to explain, because there was a reason she’d come there. “We kind of got divorced. That’s not… you don’t do that. It was forever, on Krypton. You said the words and it was forever. But I… I did everything wrong and it’s all my fault. I made everything go wrong from the beginning.” She shook her head, trying to clear her blurry vision. “She was so unhappy. I made her so unhappy that she broke our bond. It’s so important to her to honor Krypton, to honor her culture, and she lost that because of me.”

“It is indeed a serious undertaking to separate from your bondmate,” Alura’s AI said, gently concerned, “but it is not unprecedented. A bond is a partnership. A bond supports the Houses it brings together. It amplifies the worth two individuals have to offer to one another. If a bond does not do these things, it may be dissolved.”

Alex looked up, full of hope. “So I didn’t ruin her?”

“I cannot say, Alexandra Danvers. I do not have sufficient information.”

There was a shuffle behind her and then Kara was wrapping her in her arms, and Alex was sure it was a dream. “You didn’t ruin me,” the apparition said, and it sounded sad. Heartbroken.

Alex buried her face in the apparition’s neck and breathed in deeply. “I miss you so much,” she said, pressing herself against every inch of not-Kara she could. It felt so real, Kara’s skin hot against her and the pressure of her arms around Alex’s back just short of too tight. “I wish you still loved me.”

“Of course I love you.” Apparition-Kara’s breath ruffled her hair in a way that tickled.

“You left me. I deserved it.”

Apparition-Kara pulled away and looked down at Alex sadly. “You’re hurt,” she said, cupping Alex’s face in her hands. Alex tried to focus on her but couldn’t, her eyes not quite able to track. “You have a concussion. You should be in the medbay.”

Alex shook her head, growing agitated. “I always liked the way you touched me.” She leaned into Kara tiredly as tears gathered in her eyes. “You thought Clark just gave you away. You thought you didn’t have a choice.”

“I fell in love with you, Alex.”

The words didn’t seem to register with Alex, whose eyes were glassy and whose thoughts were a circular, disassembled puzzle. “You tried to love me and I didn’t believe you.”

Kara gathered Alex in her arms, giving an appreciative look to the AI of her mother which was watching with the disassociation of the no longer living. “You’re hurt,” she said again, placing a soft kiss on Alex’s forehead.

She angled them out of the room with the AI, striding through the hallways of the DEO as if there was nothing out of the ordinary about seeing Supergirl with Agent Danvers in a bridal carry. She murmured _shh_ softly as Alex continued to ramble, saying things Kara doubted she wanted her to hear.

“I see them now,” Alex was saying, “all the warning signs. You gave me so many chances. So many, and I blew each and every one of them. I thought everything I said was right, you know? No way you would have picked me if things had been different. I thought you couldn’t really mean it. I thought I was protecting myself. But you know what? It didn’t matter why you loved me. It only mattered that you did. And I hurt you. I was unworthy.” She paused and looked around, momentarily seeming to occupy the present. “I’m floating. Kara, are you seeing this?”

Despite the gravity of the moment, Kara laughed. “I see it.”

Alex reached up with fingers that didn’t quite land at their intended location, running her hand over Kara’s cheek instead of catching the happy curve of her mouth. “You’re so pretty. I never told you that. I was stupid, you know.”

“Quiet,” Kara soothed again, slowing as the medbay came into sight.

“You said I was unworthy and I was. I couldn’t even argue it.”

“You weren’t. You couldn’t be. Never, Alex.”

A harried nurse caught sight of them and sighed in irritation. “Found her,” the nurse called out, striding forward to relieve Kara of her burden before Kara could say more. Kara gently placed Alex on her feet, steadying her as she swayed, and tried not to think about how good it’d felt to have her in her arms. “I have no idea how she got out,” the nurse reassured her. “Don’t worry. We’ve got her from here.”

“My hero,” Alex said with a lopsided grin, placing a soft, slightly bloody kiss on the corner of Kara’s mouth before allowing herself to be led away.

Kara wiped the blood away with the sleeve of her uniform and tried not to cry.


	7. Walk with me

Alex was a sullen, angry ball of post-concussion wrath in her passenger’s seat, but Kara didn’t care.

“I don’t need anyone to watch over me.” It was perhaps the fifteenth time Alex had said it, nearly subvocal and with a healthy amount of sulk. She said it even though the cut on her cheek was held together with two small butterfly bandages, the skin around her eye stained black, and the corner of her mouth swollen and bruised.

In the past, Kara might have reacted to Alex’s irritation differently. Pre-Red K incident, she would have been half amused and half frustrated, because if anyone needed someone watching over them, it was Alex. And, if anyone was going to do the watching, it was clearly going to be Kara. Post-Red K incident, she just would have been annoyed, because Rao-forbid Alex allow herself to be weak in any way or react in a fashion that made things easier instead of more difficult. Post-post-Red K incident, and Kara was operating under a different hypothesis.

Post-post-Red K, Kara was pretty sure Alex loved her. Like, _loved her_ loved her, and probably had for longer than Alex would ever admit. For whatever self-damaging reasons, she’d decided it was best to let no one know and to retreat into herself and agonize and over-think and generally be miserable. She probably did think being trapped in the car with Kara was some kind of literal torture.

Beside her, Alex stiffened and looked at Kara with growing panic.

“Kara, no,” Alex said, recognizing familiar streets. “Take me to my apartment. I can’t go back there right now. I just can’t, okay.”

Kara looked around for a space that would accommodate both the borrowed DEO SUV she was driving and her less than spectacular parallel parking skills.

“Alex, your apartment has all of the warmth of the Fortress. I’m not spending the next 3 days there.”

She was busy lining up initial ingress into a space that looked just wide enough when the crack of the car door opening broke her concentration. She watched in amazement as Alex vaulted herself out of the vehicle, hands stuffed in her pockets and shoulders up to her ears as she walked quickly in the opposite direction.

Kara sighed. She stepped out, looked around, found the street pretty much empty, and picked the SUV up just as much as was needed to slide it into the space. Pleased with how stealthily she’d accomplished it, she took off after Alex, breaking into a half-jog until she was beside her.

“Alex, what are you doing?”

Alex didn’t look at her. “I’m going to my apartment.”

Kara grabbed her wrist in a loose hold, not enough to impede movement but enough to remind her she was there. “You know you’ll be more comfortable in our apartment.”

The look Alex gave her was full of outraged betrayal. “It’s not our apartment, Kara,” she snapped out before returning her gaze to the sidewalk in front of her. “Not anymore.”

“Come on, Alex. You’re supposed to be resting. Does it really matter where you rest?”

“This is cruel, Kara.” Alex’s shoulders slumped and she slowed to a stop. Her sad voice and the way her eyes grew big and soft hit Kara like a lance to the chest and all she wanted was to wrap Alex up in her arms and promise her that things would be okay. That _they_ would be okay. “You’re not cruel.”

She tightened her grip on Alex’s wrist, hoping Alex saw it for the supportive touch it was and swung around so that she was facing her. “I’ve missed you too, Alex.” She admitted it even though she was almost entirely sure that Alex had absolutely no memory of her sojourn to the room housing Alura’s AI given the way she hadn’t fallen all over herself trying to explain away her confessions. An Alex with all of her memories intact would have been on her fifth line of defense by then. “Come back with me. It’s just a few days. Let me do this. Please.”

Alex looked up at her apprehensively, eyes flitting between Kara and the apartment they’d shared. When she wasn’t being stoic Agent Danvers, everything Alex was feeling had a tendency to etch itself into her delicate features. Kara searched her expression and saw insecurity, wistfulness, and sorrow, layered and beautiful.

“Let me take care of you,” she said softly. Her free hand found the hem of Alex’s DEO polo and tugged. Part of her knew she was too close and the moment was too intimate, but she felt like she’d uncovered a buried truth and she was alive with it. No, she was defiant with it, hanging on tight to the corner edge of its promise. “We have to find our way back, Alex. If not to what we were, then to something.”

She could see Alex beginning to cave, mutinously vulnerable and trusting, the way she always had when Kara had come to her openly, honestly, and sincerely.

\------

Alex was clearly uncomfortable in pajamas she’d left behind, ensconced in the bed she and Kara had shared.

“Do you have everything you need?” Kara asked, standing far enough away from the bedside to give Alex the comfort of space. “I have something I have to do for work, but I’ll be in to check on you in a couple of hours.”

“I’m fine.” Alex’s expression had morphed, becoming resigned and dour, and she took her frustration out on her pillow. It had been beaten into shape with more violence than a pillow deserved, but Alex was at least settled if not completely happy about it. There was a glass of water on the bedside table and Kara had hung a few thick blankets from the curtain rods to block out as much light as she could, but it was time to make herself scarce. Alex’s bad mood had increased in proportion to the time spent in close quarters with Kara, so for the moment, Kara had to be satisfied that she’d managed to lure Alex back in the first place.

She spent the next few hours being as quiet as she could manage, floating instead of walking to minimize creaking floorboards and echoing footsteps, and being as gentle as she could with her keyboard. Normally she had music playing in the background or the tv on, mingling with all of the other sounds she’d grown used to over time to create a background buzz of white noise. Without them, she was hyperaware of the way Alex would huff before the sheets would crinkle and the mattress flex as she rearranged herself. She kept tabs on Alex’s heartbeat and the drag of her breath, listening to her cycle in and out of sleep. When biorhythms told her Alex was sleeping, she’d float in to check on her, taking in the dark circles under her eyes and the lingering bruises and cuts left by her fight with the Infernian. An unnecessary fight, Kara wanted to point out. She might have been staggered by a blast of an Infernian’s heat vision, but she wouldn’t have been injured. There’d been no need for Alex to fling herself into the fray, taking on a being who could have literally set her aflame.

As the sun set, she carried in a tray of delivery from one of Alex’s favorite restaurants and shook her gently, trying not to be too charmed by the way Alex blinked up at her sleepily, a smile stretching across her face before she caught herself. “Dinner,” she said, settling onto the mattress cross-legged as if there was nothing out of the ordinary about it. She snagged her own carton from the tray she’d positioned over Alex’s lap, and ignored the way Alex watched her warily as she pulled herself into a sitting position and pried open the lid of the carton Kara had left for her.

“Thanks,” she said, breaking apart her wooden chopsticks and rubbing the ends together to smooth away any splinters.

They ate in a silence more comfortable than Kara could have hoped for. Her nose tickled with the scent of Alex settling back over the space, filling in something that had been missing. She took in a deep breath and hoped Alex hadn’t noticed or that, if she had, the reason for it eluded her.

Alex showered after dinner, returning to bed with her wet hair combed straight back. Kara provided another set of pajamas, faded Stanford running shorts and a tee shirt with lettering that had nearly faded into nothing. She watched through the wall as Alex stared down at it, tracing the letters – _Midvale Big Wave Invitational 2002_ – and playing with the holes that had developed along the hem. She still had most of Alex’s things. Alex had never asked for them and Kara hadn’t worked up to offering them, because it was comforting, having parts of Alex around. It was maybe counterintuitive. After all, she was the one who had ended things with admittedly brutal finality, but not because she’d stopped loving Alex.

That had never, ever been the case.

She slid into bed hours after Alex drifted off again, overly conscious of the heat of Alex at her side. She moved as little as possible, as stiff as a board and determinedly on her half of the bed. There was a clear argument that she didn’t need to be there at all. Alex had been released from the medbay once she’d become lucid again, and the instruction that she have someone stay with her and monitor her condition was a precaution. If she’d been in distress, Kara would have heard it from the other room or the other side of the city and been at her side in seconds regardless of which.

Slight, nay miniscule, duplicity aside, she drifted off to sleep to the sound of Alex’s heart beating steady and slow the way she had countless nights before.

\------

Alex awoke caught in the midst of a memory.

There was soft fabric beneath her fingers and beneath that, solid skin. She’d managed to commandeer half of Kara’s pillow, curled into her so tightly that Kara’s arm was trapped between them. Hair tickled at her nose. Through one bleary, half-opened eye, she could see the curve of Kara’s ear. A strong thigh shifted beneath the one she’d thrown over it, and all of the covers had disappeared somewhere to the far side of her bedmate.

She’d traveled back in time, back to when waking like that was a daily occurrence, and she snuggled into it, not wanting the dream to end. In real life, she’d forfeited her right to it. She’d failed so badly that monuments could have been built to her shortcomings. She’d doubted, denied, and obfuscated, and she’d lost everything in return.

That didn’t mean she couldn’t want to stay in her dream just a little while longer.

“Hey,” Kara said, shifting her head so they were facing. She had a soft, affectionate smile on her face and a lock of hair curling over her forehead, unruly and wild. “How are you feeling? Okay?”

Alex sprang back so viciously she nearly took herself over the edge of the bed.

“I’m sorry,” she hissed. “Shit. This is why this was a bad idea.”

Kara curled up on her elbows, a supine, lazy cat in need of a sunbeam. “I’ll make breakfast,” she said, ignoring Alex’s continued string of muttered apologies. She stood and stretched, loosely tied pajama pants sinking dangerously low over her hips, and Alex wondered when it was that she’d stepped directly into Hell.

She sat silently at the table, trying to avoid Kara’s eyes over a stack of pancakes. The light streaming in through the window made something ache deep behind her eyes. She ran her fingers through her hair, trying to comb it into something serviceable, and decided that this was the punishment the universe had decided to hand down for being unworthy.

“Do you remember talking to my Mom?” Kara asked, poking at a piece of pancake with her fork. She’d already worked her way through ten of them to Alex’s one and a half, and Alex wondered how long Kara would wait before asking if she was going to finish the other half. “The day before yesterday?”

Alex squinted, trying to bring the memory into focus, but she didn’t remember anything that had happened after the Infernian had bounced her head off of the pavement. “No,” she said, watching as Kara snagged the lip of her plate with her fork, dragging it across the table. “Did I?”

“You asked her if she was proud of me.” Kara grinned, cutting the remainder of Alex’s pancake into tiny pieces. She speared one, dragged it through the syrup on her own plate, and ate it. “You asked her if you’d ruined me.”

It took several long moments for Alex to recover from her coughing fit. In the interim, the rest of her pancake disappeared.

Kara slid the tines of her fork through the puddle of syrup once more before letting it clink to the plate. “And I told you that you didn’t.”

Alex closed her eyes, unable to handle the way Kara was looking at her, shy but steady. Her mouth went dry, and her hands came up to the table’s edge, braced and ready to push back. To push away, taking her away from this conversation. To take her away from this apartment, from this life that was no longer hers to have.

“I said the things I needed to say to set you free, but that doesn’t mean that everything I said was true.” She slid her hands over Alex’s, willing her to open her eyes and see.

“Don’t say that.” Alex nearly knocked her chair over as she stood, curled over the table and panting, chest tight.

“I think maybe I didn’t change when I came here, Alex. I think I just grew up. What happened would have happened regardless.” She smiled softly, hopefully. “Any way the story unfolded, I would have fallen in love with you. I just… I wanted you to know that.”

Alex stumbled back, uncomfortably vulnerable in her pajamas at a table in a home that used to be hers.

Kara’s hopeful smile cracked just a little, and Alex wanted to fix it just as much as she wanted to run away. “I think you should come back. I think we should try again. No pressure this time. No lifelong commitments or misunderstandings in the way. Unless you really don’t – never will – love me like that, Alex.”

Alex made her way to the couch on legs gone weak at the knees. She’d spent most of her time since Kara’s Red K confession wading through the tar of denial, willfully misunderstanding things that should have been clear in hindsight. Seventeen year old Alex hadn’t been carelessly attracted to Kara just because she was there. Kara hadn’t been a stand-in for unrecognized teenage sexual confusion. She’d _been_ unrecognized teenage sexual confusion, affection twined around desire with all of it hidden away. Alex just hadn’t _noticed_. She hadn’t always loved Kara, but once she had, she’d loved her in every way possible. She’d slid into and never out of it and probably never would have picked her way through it had the issue not been forced.

Even knowing that, it was easier to love than to be loved.

“You didn’t have a choice,” she countered weakly, hands wrapped white-knuckled tight around the edge of the couch cushions.

Fingers lifted her chin, and she looked up to see Kara kneeling on the floor in front of her. “Do you truly believe that?”

Alex swallowed hard and looked away.

“I’ve never loved anyone the way I love you because I’ve never found anyone else worthy of my love. No one but you.”

She said it carefully, feeling Alex’s pain echo in her chest at the deliberately chosen words. She held tight when Alex tried to pull away, not letting their eyes break contact.

“That was the truest thing you’ve ever said.” Alex shook her head, resolute. “That day.”

Kara’s hand fell to Alex’s knee. “That was desperation. That was the end of something that never should have been. Not the way it was.” She smiled sadly. “You tried to tell me.”

“It was the truth,” Alex reiterated. “I’m _unworthy_ , Kara.”

“You’re not.”

“I _am_.”

“Then we’re unworthy together.” Alex’s eyes narrowed, but Kara cut off her incipient rebuttal. “I forced something on you that was possessive and tainted. You were right. You can’t build a life on something like that. I was tied to the past. I was too busy honoring ritual to accept reality, even when it hurt both of us.”

She stood, feeling lighter than she had in ages. “It’s an open invitation, Alex, but no matter what you choose, I miss you. I want you back in my life.”

\------

Alex understood the concept of before and after, and of the wide gulf that could separate the two. There was before her dad died and after. There was before Hank recruited her into the DEO and after. There was before Kara rescued her plane and after. Each was a sharp bisection, and each left her on the other side looking back at her previous self with a little bit of awe and a little bit of sadness. The sudden possession of new knowledge made it impossible, in some ways, to understand what it was like to not have that knowledge. To contemplate a self who had managed to function despite her naivety, untouched, unchanged, and ignorant. There’d been a before-Red K. There’d been a before sex with Kara. There’d been a before Kara had severed their bond, and to Alex-after, that was the only before that mattered.

It was a clean break, cleaner than she would have expected from Kara. Mostly because she was thinking of Kara as a confidant and sister, probably, wringing her hands and obsessing and examining a situation from all angles with Alex as her sounding board. The thing was, she’d become the situation. She’d been the cause of wrung hands and obsession, and when Kara pushed through the gauntlet on her own, it’d been with a decision in hand. A Kara who’d made a decision wasn’t a Kara who was hesitant to act on it, and so she had.

Alex couldn’t really call foul. She’d been given warnings, some not even all that subtle. Even before Kara had made it clear to her, standing in front of Clark and asking him to break their bond, she’d laid out her truth. _You don’t love me like I deserve to be loved_ , she’d said.

All of which made it impossible for Alex to say – _But I do_.

 _I set you free_ , she’d said.

And in the face of that, how could she beg – _Please, don’t_.

She couldn’t decide she wanted something just as it was taken away. That was selfish, self-serving love, and so she’d left because that was what Kara wanted, and she’d been turning a blind eye to what Kara wanted for far too long. If she could, she would have left the realization of love behind as well. She would have taken it off like a coat, admired it for the beautiful thing it could have been, and hung it on a hook by the door on her way out. Perhaps she would have remembered it sometimes, the coat that had fit just right only after its season had ended. On the kind of lonely nights built for remembrances, she could have let the fact that it’d ever existed at all warm her until it was soft and comfortable and threadbare, more of a memory of a memory than the thing itself.

In retrospect, her task had been simple. Accept that she was loved and love in return. It wasn’t love’s fault it had been shaped by clumsy hands or forced into the light against its will. It was her fault, certainly, that she’d fought so long and so desperately against it. And for what? The false comfort of pretending to hold herself just out of reach of danger? To wrap a hard shell around the tenderest parts of herself in a misguided belief it would protect her? All excuses made even more pathetic when Kara had torn down all of those self-constructed walls with one single, surgical act, and lain Alex bare.

It had taken an extreme effort of will to not love Kara the way she’d wanted to be loved and no effort at all once it ceased to matter.

Kara brought it all to an end and Alex stopped. Just stopped. She stood still and let the world continue to move around her, because it chose to. She chose to exist in those last moments, when she’d closed the door on Kara’s distraught face. She remembered every aspect of it. Kara’s hand still outstretched from where their grip had parted, and her other arm wrapped around her waist as if it was the only thing keeping her together. The way her mouth had trembled and the muscles and tendons in her neck had flexed. Swallowing down what, Alex didn’t know. Sadness? Relief? The impulse to take it all back? Then there were her eyes, solemn and sorrowful, limned red with unshed tears. Her mind played the memory on a loop. Kara watching her go, disappearing behind a slowly closing door that left Alex on the other side of it.

In service of her continued ability to function, she’d prioritized. Found a place to live. Did her job. Committed to not drinking herself into a pitiable wreck. Managed to appear professional and cordial. Saved the break downs for when no one could see them. Decided to worry about rebuilding her life later, when she found a way to make it not hurt so very much.

And now Kara was offering it all back. Just like that.

“I love you,” Alex said, completely without meaning to. “You deserve to know that. I was – _am_ – in love with you. I let a lot of things get in the way of telling you that, but I don’t want it to stay unsaid.”

Kara’s smile was as radiant as the morning sun streaming through the windows behind her.

Alex tried and failed to keep her voice from cracking. “I miss you, too.” She swiped at gathering, traitorous tears. “I miss waking up with you. I miss coming home to you. I miss all of it. Everything. I’m lost without you.”

In a flash, Kara was in front of her, pulling her into a crushing hug.

“And I’ll change my name,” she said, burying her head under Kara’s chin. “I’ll tell everyone how much I love you. I’ll tell them I had to wait for you to cross galaxies.”

Kara laughed and shushed her, suffused with the vibrancy of her love. “I don’t need all of those things, Alex. I just need you.”

“No,” Alex protested, leaning back so that she could look up at Kara, expression earnest. “You need someone who stands together, not apart. You need someone who’ll share your burdens and troubles. You need someone who wants only the best for this House. I want that for you, Kara. I want to be that for you.”

“Alex…”

“I’m not trying to repeat mistakes.” She slid her hand behind Kara’s neck, through soft, thick hair still tangled from sleep. “I’m making promises, not commitments. The only thing tying me to you is love.”

Kara leaned down, pressing a soft kiss against the uninjured corner of Alex’s mouth. She straightened, took a step back, and offered Alex her hand. “Come walk with me then,” she said, Alex’s skin like home against her own.

**Author's Note:**

> I am dipping another toe into this WIP thing. Let's hope it doesn't backfire. This is where I [tumbl](http://outlyingoutlier.tumblr.com/)


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